Hacker News Reader

Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

“Model” is a dangerously overloaded word in 2023, possibly worse than Object in 1996.

When I worked on ML inference I would tease the researchers with the question “what is a model?” in the hope they would say something that constrained it in any way, but no, a model can be anything at all and is whatever you want it to be.

As such this press release is perfect nonsense, which is kind of appropriate for a Watson offshoot. If there is something interesting here it doesn’t succeed in telling you what it is.

View on HN

If you think of a model as a function approximator with an error that can only be characterized empirically, it's not a bad term at all to describe the class of algorithms ANNs belong to.

It's a real shame that the term is being abused so badly, because it's really appropriate in a lot of these cases. Or rather, it would be if people used it mindfully.

It's a better term than "algorithm" or "learner" or "AI".

It very literally is a model of the relationships within the training data.

Moreover, statisticians and other varieties of people doing data analysis have been using the term "model" to mean something along these lines for many decades already.

If anything, it's nice to see more people calling these things "models".

So what's the better word?

What it actually is: https://huggingface.co/ibm-nasa-geospatial/Prithvi-100M

“Prithvi is a first-of-its-kind temporal Vision transformer”

That is enormously more specific and interesting, and the word model is absent.

This entirely depends on context. Replacing “model” with “temporal Vision transformer” in the title would ensure only people “in the know” understand what this even is, which severely limits the reach this post obtains. The point in posting this article is to broadly inform people that this temporal Vision transformer exists. In order to do that, you have to use words the broader audience understands even if the terms aren’t perfectly accurate.

In contrast, if you’re publishing this in a machine learning journal, then sure—you should definitely call it a temporal Vision transformer.

Transformer is overly specific. Most people won't care about the actual architecture and would just treat it as a black box.

"Transformer" is a particular type of neural network architecture, and neural networks are a class of models. The term "model" in this sense has been standard in statistics and data analysis for a very long time.

So it's some coils of wire wound around a common high permeability core?

Or some kind of weird robot-car hybrid?

I guess since it's a "Vision" transformer, it's probably actually some kind of hallucinogenic plant.

dangerous how?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com