Charles, you are right, there is a deep theoretical “beef” behind the issues, but it is not my beef. The debate between “connectionist” neural network theories and symbol based theories raged very much in the 1980s, 1990s. These were really nice scientific debates based on empirical results. Connectionism faded away because it did not prove to be adequate in explaining a lot of challenges. Geoff Hinton was a big part of that debate.
When compute power and data availability grew so fantastically in the 2010s, DL started to have practical success as you see today. Hinton re emerged victoriously and has been wildly attacking believers in symbolic systems ever since. In fact there is a video of him deriding the EU for being tricked into continued funding of symbolic AI research!
I prefer to stay with scientific argumentation and claim that the fact that DL can produce Python defeats Hinton’s claim (not mine) that DL machine translation proves that language is not a symbolic process.
Charles, you are right, there is a deep theoretical “beef” behind the issues, but it is not my beef. The debate between “connectionist” neural network theories and symbol based theories raged very much in the 1980s, 1990s. These were really nice scientific debates based on empirical results. Connectionism faded away because it did not prove to be adequate in explaining a lot of challenges. Geoff Hinton was a big part of that debate.
When compute power and data availability grew so fantastically in the 2010s, DL started to have practical success as you see today. Hinton re emerged victoriously and has been wildly attacking believers in symbolic systems ever since. In fact there is a video of him deriding the EU for being tricked into continued funding of symbolic AI research!
I prefer to stay with scientific argumentation and claim that the fact that DL can produce Python defeats Hinton’s claim (not mine) that DL machine translation proves that language is not a symbolic process.