Comment by gwern
1 year ago
Leon Bottou isn't a humanities professor, but a ML researcher. In fact, not just any ML researcher but arguably one of the ML researchers who most anticipated the current DL scaling era.
Bottou was arguing for the virtues of SGD on the grounds of "CPUs [GPUs] go brrr" literally 2 decades ago in 2003: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/file/9fb7b048c96d44a0337f0... or here he is in 2007/2012 explaining why larger models/data can scale and keep getting better: https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2012-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2013-bottou.pdf
Which is not to say that he necessarily has anything worthwhile to say about 'Borges and AI' but I'm going to at least give it a read to see if there's something I might want to know 20 years from now. :)
Well the point stands, though, considering that the two papers you linked clearly read like papers. My question was mostly candidly naive and quite honest: what makes a paper a paper, when the content is something merely akin to a literary essay? I guess the answer is "the author". :D