Throughout much of the world, politicians have been slow to react to COVID-19, often starting with half measures, and typically getting to the drastic measures we really need too late, after the disease has spread to hundreds or thousands of people. Far too many leaders have taken a gradualist approach…

A Dialogue between Yoshua Bengio and Gary Marcus January 1, 2020 GM: Thanks for your last note, Yoshua, giving your definition of deep learning. I think you have your finger on something, and I definitely learned something from our conversation. Whereas I am looking for a term that describes and…

Dear Yoshua, Thank you for your speedy response to my Medium post on defining deep learning. Although your reply is strongly worded, you inadvertently confirmed my article’s central point: a distinction between deep-learning-as-open-ended-methodology and what I called core deep learning is desperately needed. To refresh your memory, I defined core…

important update, December 29, 2019: the piece below apparently led some people to think I was challenging Yoshua’s integrity. That was NOT my intent; I sincerely think his work is terrific & I admire him as a person of values and integrity. We differ on some important conceptual questions; I…

The current state of AI and Deep Learning: A reply to Yoshua Bengio Dear Yoshua, Thanks for your note on Facebook, which I reprint below, followed by some thoughts of my own. I appreciate your taking the time to consider these issues. I concur that you and I agree more…

The Past Researchers, a lot of them, have worried for a long time, about whether neural networks could generalize effectively enough to capture the richness of language. It’s been a major theme of my work, since the the 1990s, and before me Fodor and Pylyshyn and Pinker and Prince in 1988 in…

DeepMind’s new paper on learning a “machine theory of mind” is fascinating, but it again makes a philosophical error that has become characteristic of DeepMind — exactly the same error I discussed four weeks ago, in an arXiv paper evaluating AlphaGo [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05667]. DeepMind’s AlphaGo paper claimed to build a Go…

“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” — Often attributed to Schopenhauer In a recent appraisal of deep learning (Marcus, 2018) I outlined ten challenges for deep learning, and suggested that deep learning by itself, although…