Relative to his level of fame, his actual level of contribution as far as pushing forward AI, I’m not so sure about.
I deeply appreciate his educational content and I’m glad that it has led to a way for him to gain influence and sustain a career. Hopefully he’s rich enough from that that he can focus 100% on educational stuff!
Are you sure about your perspective?
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
He contributed to pushing forward AI, no “actual” about it. The loss of a great educator should be viewed with just as much sadness as the loss of a great engineer.
So, he has made theoretical contributions to the space, contributions to prominent private organizations in the space, and broadly educated others about the space. What more are you looking for?
He did pioneering research in image captioning - aligning visual and textual semantic spaces - the conceptual foundation of modern image generators. He also did an excellent analysis of RNNs - one of the first and best explanations of what happens under the hood of a language model.
He lead a team of one of the most common uses of DNNs, if that isn't 'pushing AI forward', I think you're confused. It's certainly pushing it forward quite a bit more than the publishing game where 99% of the papers are ignored by the people actually building real applications of AI.
I mean, I don't know why people still try to devalue educating the masses. Anyone who's had to knowledge share know how hard it is to make a concise but approachable explanation for someone who knows relatively little about the field.
In addition, he's still probably in a standing well above the 80% mark in terms of technical prowess. even without influencer fame I'm sure he can get into any studio he wishes.
IMO governments, like websites, should be boring but effective, focused on small day to day improvements, not all flash and empty marketing chasing cultural trends...
Take CS 231, for example, which stands as one of Stanford's most popular AI/ML courses. Think about the number of students who have taken this class from around 2015 to 2017 and have since advanced in AI. It's fair to say a good chunk of credit goes back to that course.
Instructors who break it down, showing you how straightforward it can be, guiding you through each step, are invaluable. They play a crucial role in lowering the entry barriers into the field. In the long haul, it's these newcomers, brought into AI by resources like those created by Karpathy, who will drive some of the most significant breakthroughs. For instance, his "Hacker's Guide to Neural Networks," now almost a decade old, provided me with one of the clearest 'aha' moments in understanding back-propagation.
That blog post inspired Alec Radford at Open AI to do the research that produced the "Unsupervised sentiment neuron": https://openai.com/research/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron
Open AI decided to see what happened if they scaled up that model by leveraging the new Transformer architecture invented at Google, and they created something called GPT: https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...
"In fact, I’d go as far as to say that
The concept of attention is the most interesting recent architectural innovation in neural networks."
I'd say that that his work on AI has been significant and his ability to teach has contributed to that greatly.
What do you know about his work?
He's been leading the vision team at Tesla, implementing in the field all the papers that were available in the subject of autonomous driving and vision (he explicitly wrote that). He has not published about it surely due to obligations with Tesla.
I don’t see that as an issue though, just a natural consequence of his great work in teaching neural networks!
Even the HN discussion around this had comments like "this feels my baby learning to speak.." which are the same comparisons people were saying when LLMs hit mainstream in 2022
I'd agree with that, however I've always wondered how easy it is for folks at that level to get hands on keyboards and not wind up spending their days polishing slide decks for talks instead.
But try convincing a democracy that politicians should be paid more.
People just get bored and go do something else for a while sometimes. Or he's got some beef.
Me changing can never be used as an appraisal of my old organisation so.
Disclaimer: regarding money, if I get enough in max a year to rezire forever after that, I might be tempted. Which won't happen, because a) I'd just leave a year later anyway and b) nobody would pay me high 7 figures just to not quit.
I believe the basic pay is £86k. They're not brain surgeons or rocket scientists, so even that is not that bad.
But I believe the average gravy train bumps this up 3X with extras.
It's a literal gravy train of subsidies and expenses and allowances! Sure the basic pay is, well, it's arguably not that bad ... but the gravy on top is tremendous. Not to mention the network contacts which plug their gravy train into the more lucrative gravy superhighway later.
Yeah, voters don't want to pay MPs more. Yet when voters are asked, they want highly intelligent, motivated people. They want them to have technical expertise, which means time spent in higher education. Then they want them to work a full time job in Parliament during the week, but also be open to constituency concerns on the weekend. And once all of this is pointed out, voters concede that maybe MPs deserve to be paid on par with professionals like doctors. (It's a different matter that UK doctors are underpaid).
> But I believe the average gravy train bumps this up 3X with extras.
Citation needed. They're on a shorter leash now with expenses. Don't go citing one or two bad apples either, show us what the median MP claims as expenses. According to you, it should be around £170k a year.
In general, politicians and their aides in the UK are underpaid. Most capable people find they're better off working in Canary Wharf or elsewhere in London. An example is the head of economic policy for the Labour Party earning £50k while writing policy for a £2 trn economy. (https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/01/19/british-politic...)
Maybe Congress needs the equivalent of UX and product types who actually care about what the people want... and can explain how it works to us in fancy how-to videos.
Anyway, I'm very sure there are good MP's, but I'll not go so far as to say these people are underpaid.
I plugged the question into AI ... see below. Not to mention the subsidised "everything". Holidays in mates villas (and what mates, eh). The "director" positions on various companies, and, and ... it's not just the monetary value of these things. It's an absolute gravy train.
Generated Hypothetical Answers: we can provide some hypothetical scenarios based on varying levels of responsibility:
Scenario 1: Backbench MP without additional roles:
Salary: £86,584
Maximum Expense Claims:
Office: £85,000
Accommodation (Constituency only): £9,300
Travel: Assuming moderate travel expenses, let's estimate £10,000
Other Expenses: £5,000
Scenario 2: MP with Ministerial role and chairing a committee:
Salary: £86,584 + Ministerial salary (e.g., £50,000)
Expense Claims: Similar to Scenario 1, let's use the same estimates
Total: £86,584 + £50,000 + £85,000 + £9,300 + £10,000 + £5,000 + £11,600 = £257,484
Remember: These are just hypothetical examples, and the actual value for any individual MP can be significantly higher or lower depending on their specific circumstances.
sure it would be nice if we could have Aristotelian philosopher kings style politicians but that's not human nature.
Members of Congress have plenty of support devoted to both what people say they want and what they actually positively respond to. That’s...the entire political side of the operation.
Agree he had a decent overall track record at Stanford, but that’s not how tenure works — it might have got his foot in the door as an assistant professor somewhere. He chose a much more lucrative path.