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The bias against neural nets, Hinton felt, was “ideological,” a word he pronounced in the same venomous tone that Huang had used to say “political.” The ideology of the research community at the time was that it was not enough that AI be useful. Instead, AI should somehow “unlock” the secrets of intelligence and encode them in math. The standard, 1,100-page AI textbook of the time was a survey of probabilistic reasoning, decision trees, and support-vector machines. The neural nets got just ten pages, with a brief discussion of backgammon up front. When Hinton’s colleague designed a neural net that outperformed state-of-the-art software for recognizing pedestrians, he couldn’t even get his paper admitted to a conference. “The reaction was well, that doesn’t count, because it doesn’t explain how the computation is done—it’s just not telling us anything,” Hinton said.
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Stephen Witt (The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip)