←back to thread

The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

(www.understandingai.org)
251 points slyall | 1 comments | 06 Nov 24 04:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
Show context
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.

replies(10): >>42058980 #>>42059047 #>>42059100 #>>42059544 #>>42059813 #>>42060244 #>>42060447 #>>42060561 #>>42060833 #>>42062658 #
1. dr_dshiv ◴[06 Nov 24 12:05 UTC] No.42060833[source]▶
The best tool for the job is, I’d argue, the one that does the job most reliably for the least amount of money. When you consider how little expertise or data you need to use openai offerings, I’d be surprised if sentiment analysis using classical ML methods are actually better (unless you are an expert and have a good dataset).