Sharing — Reaching New Heights with Artificial Neural Networks

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun Q&A

Sik-Ho Tsang
3 min readOct 13, 2022
Q&A Interview, by Technology Writer Leah Hoffmann

This time, I would like to share a Q&A interview of Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun, who are recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award. This is a magazine article from Communications of ACM (CACM) in 2019. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium)

1. AI Inspired from the Brain

At the beginning, they mentioned the relationship between AI and human brain. And we are far from human-level AI. We need new paradigms.

“Although deep learning takes inspiration from the brain and from cognition, many engineers involved with it these days don’t care about those topics.” … “In terms of research, I think it’s a big loss if we don’t keep the connection alive with people who are trying to understand how the brain works.” by Bengio.

“Now, neuroscientists are taking seriously the possibility that something like backpropagation is going on in the brain, and that’s a very exciting area.” … “people are basically massive analogy-making machines. They develop these representations quite slowly, and then the representations they develop determine the kinds of analogies they can make.” by Hinton.

2. AI Research Development

They are also surprised how fast the AI research development is.

“Some of the most innovative ideas will come from people much younger than us. … I was surprised by how late the deep learning revolution was, but also by how fast it developed once it started.” … “It’s also amazing how quickly these techniques became so useful for so many industries” by LeCun.

Modern neural nets are different in nature from what we were thinking about in the 1980s, and they can do things that are much closer to what we do when we reason, what we do when we program computers.” by Bengio.

3. Make AI More Accessible

AI should be more accessible to help more people.

Are they going to be concentrated in the hands of a few countries, a few companies, and a small class of people, or can we find ways to make them more accessible, especially in countries where they could make a bigger difference for more people?” by Bengio.

Google is trying to make this technology accessible to as wide a set of people as possible.” by Hinton.

“The deep learning community has been very good at promoting the idea of open research.” by LeCun.

I only have some of the quotes above. Please kindly read the whole article if interested. The below is the associated video for this magazine article:

At the end of video, Geoffrey Hinton says: “If you have an idea and it seems to you it has to be right, don’t let people tell you it is silly. Just ignore them.”

Reference

[2019 CACM] [New Heights with ANN]
Reaching New Heights with Artificial Neural Networks

0. Legends

2019 [New Heights with ANN] 2021 [Deep Learning for AI] 2022 [Small is the New Big]

My Other Previous Paper Readings

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Sik-Ho Tsang

PhD, Researcher. I share what I learn. :) Linktree: https://linktr.ee/shtsang for Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.