The Road to AI We Can Trust
Most people think of Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun as matter and anti-matter (or perhaps the other way around). But that wasn’t always the case. One upon a time Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun were friends; they did a number of public events together, and even appeared side-by-side in a famous photo together, which LeCun posted on Facebook, at the time describing Gary Marcus as his favorite critic. (Later, immediately after LeCun won the Turing Award along with Hinton and Bengio, the photo circulated again, with Marcus cropped out).
Indeed in 2017, Marcus and LeCun appeared together in a very civilized, and very interesting debate, moderated by David Chalmers at NYU. Marcus opened the debate with a list of things the two agreed up, and when Marcus earlier that day sent the list to LeCun, LeCun wrote back swiftly, and agreed on their points of agreement:
Things changed, seemingly for good, on January 2, 2018, when Marcus posted his infamous Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, to which LeCun did not take kindly; LeCun tossed it off as “mostly wrong”, and the Twitter Wars began. Articles were written about these battles.
