• khalid_salad@awful.systems
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    2 hours ago

    So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.

    Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it’s nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    3 hours ago

    Repeating a comment I made in another forum here…


    The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

  • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    Hopfield is enormously influential, I don’t mind him getting a major prize at all. Physics seems weird tho.

  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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    3 hours ago

    Out of curiosity, are they using any of his underlying ML techniques to analyze imaging/other data collection before using it in actual physics models?

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      28 minutes ago

      Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        25 minutes ago

        That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not wild to give him a prize in physics if his techniques led to advancement in physics.

        “CS is applied math, not applied physics” like physics isn’t just applied math to model real world data is kind of weird, especially if his particular math actually got used in physics. That’s pretty much what calculus was.