Thursday, February 8, 2018

Critique on "Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal "

Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal 

Gary Marcus argues that deep learning is : 
1. Shallow : Meaning it has limited capacity for transfer 
2. Data Hungry: Requires millions of examples to generalize sufficiently
3. Not transparent enough: It is treated as a black box

I'm not an academic but I've been reading research papers and I've seen a huge effort on all 3 fronts. (cudos to https://blog.acolyer.org/

New architectures and layers that require far fewer data and can be used for several unrelated tasks. 
A lot of opening the black box approachs based on anything from MDL, to information theory and statistics on interpreting the weights, layers and results. 

It's not all doom and gloom but huge the milestone jumps like the ones we had in the last 5 years in most AI/ML tasks are probably in the past. What we will see is a culling of a lot of bad tech and hype and the quiet rise of Differentiable Neural Computing.  



For a high level understanding of deep learning click here