
How the AI revolution was born in a Vancouver hotel - jonbaer
http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/how-the-artificial-intelligence-revolution-was-born-in-a-vancouver-hotel
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ryporter
This is an ignorant and hyperbolic characterization of recent developments in
neural networks. In no way did most AI researchers think that it was "nuts" to
learn using neural nets. Instead, neural networks was an approach that had
fallen out of favor, and many considered other approaches to be more
promising. However, I don't think that any serious researcher has ever called
Geoffrey Hinton "nuts." He was very well respected in his field before this
epic hotel meeting.

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derefr
The comparison was between AI and procedural programming, not between machine
learning and AI. It was a reference to the more general second AI winter,
which basically ended due to the success of neural-network approaches.

Ten years ago, a programmer in industry generally would not throw machine-
learning at a problem as their first—or even their last—approach; it just
wasn't a tool in most non-academics' toolboxes, and even where it was, the
common wisdom was that its application was limited to certain conventional
uses, like spam filtering. Now we've basically landed in that "throwing around
learning models like they were if statements" world that seemed like science
fiction just a short while ago.

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andreyk
Machine Learning was still well liked and accepted in research, and in fact
the stuff that is solved by ML today (speech and object recognition, most
significantly) was still solved by ML back then. I completely agree this
article is very hyperbolic.

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MikeNomad
Title seems like click bait to me. Article is an interesting bit about Nural
Networks in specific, not AI in general.

Also, not seeing any "revolution" going on.

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aswanson
Yup. I sometimes check the comments on submissions with titles like this but
never click the url.

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hacker_9
what 'revolution'?

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samfisher83
Warren Sturgis McCulloch one of the guys who invented Neural Networks was a
doctor

