Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely agree fwiw. Scale out over LeCunns desired exploratory research was absolutely the right call. Called out because it seems like MS is making a similar call.

The author states "I consider the scaling-only focus to be both misdirected and not fun.". I get the point but also totally get the focus on scale out for now.

View on HN

I empathize with LeCunn but he is a prime example of why scientists often make poor leaders. It’s too tempting to always do the cool and interesting thing instead of drilling down on the boring but reliable thing that actually creates value. There is of course a place for this kind of eternal curiosity and I hope he’s found it, but hyper-competitive industry may not be it.

They have different jobs.

For a corporation it is to make money.

For a researcher it is to explore and illuminate. That this exploration and illumination often leads to a landfall of new wealth generation is a happy accident. This ensures that the monied class would bet some of their capital on them, at least the wise ones.

Ironically, Yann is kind of known in academic circles for being the guy working on boring, unsexy stuff (deep learning) when all the other academics were doing sexy cutting edge SVMs and stuff. That’s probably why he got the Meta job in the first place.

I'm becoming more sympathetic to LeCun's views, but being able to train something that acts the tiniest bit like those who made the training data (authors, professors, researchers, etc) is an absolute juggernaut and will be for some time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com