The moment I realized that Deep Learning is nothing more than a non-linear matrix operation I lost a big deal of respect for the field. I still believe the potential of Deep Learning is huge, since many, especially larger companies, have lots of data that just sits there waiting for some innovation. DL can deliver more productivity, i.e. higher quality, faster processes etc. That is great. But this has very little to do with the fancy sci-fi version of AI.
While it's true that the basics of Deep Learning (eg ImageNet) are not that conceptually interesting, it is also worth noting people are working on tons of interesting directions within this framework combined with other ideas from AI (see eg 'Learning to Reason with Third-Order Tensor Products' - https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.12143 | 'Beyond imitation: Zero-shot task transfer on robots by learning concepts as cognitive programs' - https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.02788)
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