last byte

P H O T O S B Y A L E X A N D E R B E R G

searchers, and we are always impatient for more, because we are far from human-level AI, and the dream of understanding the principles of intelligence, natural or artificial.

What isn’t discussed enough?

HINTON: What does this tell us about how the brain works? People ask that, but not enough people are asking that.

BENGIO: It’s true. Unfortunately, al-
though deep learning takes inspiration
from the brain and from cognition, many
engineers involved with it these days
don’t care about those topics. It makes
sense, because if you’re applying things
in industry, it doesn’t matter. But in
terms of research, I think it’s a big loss if
we don’t
ble?” In the old days, people in AI made
grand claims, and they sometimes
turned out to be just a bubble. But neu-
ral nets go way beyond promises. The
technology actually works. Further-
more, it scales. It automatically gets
better when you give it more data and a
faster computer, without anybody hav-
ing to write more lines of code.

YANN LECUN: That’s true. The basic idea of deep learning is not going away, but it’s still frustrating when people ask if all we need to do to make machines more intelligent is simply scale our current methods. We need new paradigms.

YOSHUA BENGIO: The current techniques have many years of industrial and scientific application ahead of them. That said, the three of us are re-

ONCE TREATED BY the field with skepticism (if not outright derision), the artificial neural networks that 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio spent their careers developing are today an integral component of everything from search to content filtering. So what of the now-red-hot field of deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI)? Here, the three researchers share what they find exciting, and which challenges remain.

There’s so much more noise now about artificial intelligence than there was when you began your careers—some of it well-informed, some not. What do you wish people would stop asking you?