My view is we should be doing everything we can to come up with ways of exploiting the current technology effectively.
We want to take AI and CIFAR to wonderful new places, where no person, no student, no program has gone before.
The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.
Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals.
Making everything more efficient should make everybody happier.
I get very excited when we discover a way of making neural networks better - and when that's closely related to how the brain works.
I think the way we're doing computer vision is just wrong.
My main interest is in trying to find radically different kinds of neural nets.
Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it's going to be solved by deep learning. There's going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.
Most people in AI, particularly the younger ones, now believe that if you want a system that has a lot of knowledge in, like an amount of knowledge that would take millions of bits to quantify, the only way to get a good system with all that knowledge in it is to make it learn it. You are not going to be able to put it in by hand.
The paradigm for intelligence was logical reasoning, and the idea of what an internal representation would look like was it would be some kind of symbolic structure. That has completely changed with these big neural nets.
In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.
In science, you can say things that seem crazy, but in the long run, they can turn out to be right. We can get really good evidence, and in the end, the community will come around.
I feel slightly embarrassed by being called 'the godfather.'
I have a Reagan-like ability to believe in my own data.
The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.
Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.
Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don't get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.
The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it.
I am scared that if you make the technology work better, you help the NSA misuse it more. I'd be more worried about that than about autonomous killer robots.
