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The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

(www.understandingai.org)
251 points slyall | 2 comments | 06 Nov 24 04:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.415s | source
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DeathArrow ◴[06 Nov 24 09:10 UTC] No.42058383[source]▶
I think neural nets are just a subset of machine learning techniques.

I wonder what would have happened if we poured the same amount of money, talent and hardware into SVMs, random forests, KNN, etc.

I don't say that transformers, LLMs, deep learning and other great things that happened in the neural network space aren't very valuable, because they are.

But I think in the future we should also study other options which might be better suited than neural networks for some classes of problems.

Can a very large and expensive LLM do sentiment analysis or classification? Yes, it can. But so can simple SVMs and KNN and sometimes even better.

I saw some YouTube coders doing calls to OpenAI's o1 model for some very simple classification tasks. That isn't the best tool for the job.

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1. trhway ◴[06 Nov 24 10:05 UTC] No.42059100[source]▶
>I wonder what would have happened if we poured the same amount of money, talent and hardware into SVMs, random forests, KNN, etc.

people did that to horses. No car resulted from it, just slightly better horses.

>I saw some YouTube coders doing calls to OpenAI's o1 model for some very simple classification tasks. That isn't the best tool for the job.

This "not best tool" is just there for the coders to call while the "simple SVMs and KNN" would require coding and training by those coders for the specific task they have at hand.

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2. guappa ◴[06 Nov 24 11:09 UTC] No.42060054[source]▶
[citation needed]