TechTakes

1401 readers

204 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

The Nobel Prize in physics goes to Geoffrey Hinton for his work in computer science. What? (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?

If only, it's not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).

Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it's a wee bit controversial because of the whole "people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn't get any award" thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn't work and it's extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.