zlacker

>>RobinH+(OP)
This does feel a bit like under grad introduction to statistical analysis and surprising anyone felt the need to explain these things. But I also suspect most AI people out there now a days have limited math skills so maybe it’s helpful?

>>fnordp+Are
As an ML researcher who started in physics (this seems common among physics/math turned ML people. Which Evan is included), I cannot tell you how bad is it... One year at CVPR when diffusion models hit the scenes I was asking what people's covariance was (I had overestimated the model complexity), and the most common answer I got was "how do I calculate that?" People do not understand things like what "pdf" means. People at top schools! I've been told I'm "gatekeeping" for saying that you should learn math (I say "you don't need math to build good models, but you do to understand why they're wrong"). Not that you need to, but should. (I guess this explains why Mission Impossible Language Models won best paper...)

I swear, the big reason models are black boxes are because we _want_ them to be. There's clear anti-sentiment mentality against people doing theory and the result of this shows. I remember not too long ago Yi Tay (under @agihippo but main is @YiTayML) said "fuck theorists". I guess it's not a surprise Deep Mind recently hired him after that "get good" stuff.

Also, I'd like to point out, the author uses "we" but the paper only has one author on it. So may I suggest adding their cat as a coauthor? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard

>>godels+5Ke
As someone who had questions about some of what you said and feels legitimately scared to ask what you meant out of fear of being judged:

> I've been told I'm "gatekeeping"

I mean...when the alternative is politely (better yet - excitedly) answering the question asked? You kind of are.

> I swear, the big reason models are black boxes are because we _want_ them to be.

Talk is cheap.

> I guess it's not a surprise Deep Mind recently hired him after that "get good" stuff.

I agree "fuck theorists" is in no way constructive. But, Deep Mind has objectively helped move the field forward. And your criticism of "get good" stuff? Did you not just tell people to "learn math" rather than help them to understand it yourself? That's the _exact_ meaning of the phrase "get good" on the internet. At best you're both being about as toxic (at least from your own description).