[FRIAM] Interview with Jeremy Howard

[Marcus Daniels]

There’s also the possibility of learning a generative model that can sample examples dependent on certain givens.   It opens up the possibility of empirical study.  One can generate unseen data that may represent deep structure.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 10:39 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Interview with Jeremy Howard

Deep learning mostly seems to be the good old back-propagation in feedforward neural networks which is rediscovered every 10 years by a new generation. Plus more data and more servers. The result is reasonable pattern recognition which lacks explainability. As Noah Smith said

Deep learning is basically just a computer saying "I can't quite define it, but I know it when I see it."
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1361752362969272321

-J.

-------- Original message --------
From: jon zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com<mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com>>
Date: 2/24/21 18:13 (GMT+01:00)
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Interview with Jeremy Howard

I appreciate Jeremy's spit and elbow grease approach to developing his lab, his youthful heart/naivety, and the emphasis he places on architecture and profiling over analytic bounds. His position mostly focuses on the importance of "getting up, getting out, and getting something"<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CssC-DY4lO8&ab_channel=OutkastVEVO> with respect to AI, though something about his enthusiasm and virtue signaling gives me pause. Silicon Valley 2.0 is hyper-obsessed with the ethics of its earlier form, and so there remains something disturbing about white men continuing the pattern of imperialism under the guise of missionary work, a mission to serve the noble savages. This pattern is by no means new and to the extent that his desire to help is as authentically quixotic as he presents, it can likely be remedied with a little self-reflection.

While I continue to hold out for high-level neural network theories, I do very much appreciate the attempts to remove false barriers to entry. One tension I feel, when I take a few steps back, is repeated in the very development of the web and more generally in the euro-centric story of westward expansion. The former conveys the tribulations of a world now burdened with Javascript in which we (in the field) scramble to work out what's next (web assembly?) and determine the meaningful patterns. The latter is the story of opportunity in the wilderness followed by the inevitable harness of law (True Grit). If the goal is authenticity wrt distancing ourselves from Silicon Valley 1.0, I wish to see authentically new narratives and archetypes.

All that said, I am excited about the work Jeremy and his wife are doing and I mostly agree that coding is an essential literacy. --trigger warning-- Even if tomorrow the world's computers were to disappear, we would continue to depend on this literacy.

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