Sayash Kapoor

And maybe like credit where credit is due, I think Daniel was one of the few people who got some things right in his report from 2021.

Was it about what 2025 looks like?

But in general, I would say the community has a very poor track record.

Come again?

I guess the entire skepticism about neural networks.

So from the 1990s to the 2010s, the entire AI community has dismissed neural networks as a joke.

Basically, you could count the number of researchers who took you seriously if you worked on neural networks on two hands.

It was only through the persistence of a few people like Fei-Fei Li, who released this big data set that led to the deep learning revolution, and Joshua and Jan and Jeffrey Hinton, who later went on to win the Turing Award for their work on deep learning, that this sort of subfield persisted and eventually was able to disprove claims of skeptics.

And in the same way, I think the AI community might be hurting too much around, let's say, transformer-based models right now, and perhaps at the expense of other transformative improvements that are breakthrough improvements that are sort of being sidelined because of this community's single-minded focus on it.

Sayash?

I guess the biggest surprise for me was how few people read things in depth.

I mean, it was honestly shocking.

Like in the first line of the essay, we compare AI to the internet or perhaps the electricity, like electrical revolution.

We talk about AI's impact as sort of being at par with perhaps the first industrial revolution.

And people put us in the same camp as Gary Marcus sometimes.

which is just honestly shocking.

But you know, like one level deeper, I think it has been really nice to see sort of these intellectual communities use these essays to advance their intellectual thinking.

I think perhaps the biggest surprise to me was the fact that like our essay and perhaps both of our essays were sort of taken so seriously by people who are thinking deeply about the future of AI and that was really heartwarming.

I do understand that.

I mean, I guess part of it is the fact that we have been in these cycles of discourse where at least the people who are thinking seriously about AI take it for granted that AI is transformative.