Comment by bigyabai
14 days ago
> the godfather of the current wave of AI
Here we go again...
Geoffrey Hinton is popular because of ML. You know why he doesn't understand the modern wave of LLMs? Because the transformer architecture isn't his invention. He had almost nothing to do with it. It's like saying that nobody understands how the nuclear bomb works simply because Einstein won't explain it to you in detail. There is a science here, and denying that it can be interpreted or understood is simply hysterical. We can perfectly well understand a Markov chain, why are LLMs any different?
The "current wave of AI" is an autoregressive feed-forward algorithm inferring tokenized data using complex pretrained weights. In simple terms, you could describe this as a token predictor without glossing over any details that are fundamentally important. To call it "reductionist" you would have to explain what is missing from the definition, not simply that you distrust people who understand it.
Unless I'm mistaken, the transformer architecture isn't your invention either, yet you claim to understand it better than Geoffrey Hinton.
Did you invent the transformer architecture yourself, and I am mistaken to guess that you probably understand it less than Geoffrey Hinton does?
I'll venture a wild guess that you probably haven't been working in the field as long as he has, and you don't personally know as many people in the field as he does, huh?
Or is my presumptuous chain of logic just a random thoughtless unconscious probabilistic stream of tokens that has nothing to do with reality, and I don't realize I'm speaking to Ashish Vaswani himself?
Then why don't you use your real name as you HN handle, are you really that modest, Ashish? And don't you have better things to do than posting to Hacker News? If you really wanted to win an argument from authority, you could at least post under your real name, Mr. Vaswani.
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