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Comment by dhab | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I am a lay technical person and don't know much about AI.

I find this article somewhat condescending. I look at all the current development as stepping stones to progress, not an overnight success that does everything flawlessly. I imagine the future might be some combination of different solutions, and what the author proposes may or may not play a part in it.

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I agree. Overhype is annoying, but it happens with every technological advance. So does the inevitable backlash jump from "some people claim too much" to "this whole field is a bubble with no real gains". Both are cliched viewpoints that give a false sense of being "in the know" without helping anyone navigate change effectively.

it's not a stepping stone, if you look closely it's a dead end

I don't see how systematically accurate image classifiers and facial recognition systems built on deep learning is a 'dead end'. Products are products. If deep learning has led to actual profits in actual companies, it's not a dead end. As to whether this leads to AGI is a completely different question.

The point is that the profits may not be as grand as the current level of hype may indicate

Edit: additionally it could be a dead end because the hype tends to narrow the directions we explore with ML. If everyone is obsessing about DL, we could be infuriatingly ignoring other research directions right under our noses.

What do you see exactly when you look closely and how do you know it is dead end?

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