We May be Surprised Again: Why I take LLMs seriously.

"Deep Learning is Easy, Learn something Harder" - I proclaimed in one of my early and provocative blog posts from 2016. While some observations were fair, that post is now evidence that I clearly underestimated the the impact simple techniques will have, and probably gave counterproductive advice. I wasn't alone

March 22, 2023 We May be Surprised Again: Why I take LLMs seriously. "Deep Learning is Easy, Learn something Harder" - I proclaimed in one of my early and provocative blog posts from 2016. While some observations were fair, that post is now evidence that I clearly underestimated the impact simple techniques will have, and probably gave counterproductive advice. I wasn't alone in my deep learning skepticism, in fact I'm far from being the most extreme deep learning skeptic. Many of us who grew up working in Bayesian ML, convex optimization, kernels and statistical learning theory confidently pr

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• Alex K. Chen

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