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Lex Fridman: Recipe for Progress in AI (Hard Work)


Transcript

I mentioned soup in terms of progress. There's been a little bit of tension, a little bit of love online in terms of deep learning. So I just wanted to say that the kind of criticism and skepticism about the limitations of deep learning are really healthy in moderation. Jeff Hinton, one of the three people to receive the Turing Award, as many people know, has said that the future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.

So that suspicion, skepticism is essential, but in moderation, just a little bit. The more important thing is perseverance, which is what Jeffrey Hinton and the others have had through the winters of believing in neural nets and an open-mindedness for returning to the world of symbolic AI, of expert systems, of complexity and cellular automata, of old ideas in AI and bringing them back and see if there's ideas there.

And of course, you have to have a little bit of crazy. Nobody ever achieves something brilliant without being a little bit of crazy. And the most important thing is a lot of hard work. It's not the cool thing these days, but hard work is everything. I like what JFK said about us going to the moon, us.

I was born in the Soviet Union. See how I conveniently just said us? (audience laughing) Going to the moon is, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. And I think that artificial intelligence is one of the hardest and most exciting problems that are before us.

So with that, I'd like to thank you and see if there's any questions. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)