People in the field knows the political war led by Gary Marcus. He is writing articles like this since many years now. My own experience with him left me with bad taste about his depth of knowledge and his ability to generate meaningful insights. I found him pointlessly criticizing deep learning papers without actually understanding them (on one instance, even without actually reading the paper) and then use other peoples technical comments to make case for his agenda. He keeps harping on problem X and Y for deep learning while none of his “symbolic AI” stuff has ever worked anywhere close to anything significant. Fortunately for him, he is a professor and so others in the field have to entertain him constantly.
>> He keeps harping on problem X and Y for deep learning while none of his “symbolic AI” stuff has ever worked anywhere close to anything significant.
As the most trivial counterpoint to that outrageous statement, the first system to dominate humans at chess was a symbolic system, DeepBlue (using a hard-coded opening book and evaluation function and minimax with alpha-beta cutoff, and no neural networks whatsoever).
