Chad took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Chad maintained it was the _wrong subgenre_ of science fiction. His team was building the computer from _Star Trek_, not _A Fire Upon the Deep_: tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a piecewise linear function to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a piecewise linear function fitted to _the entire internet_, previous generations must have found it equally counterintuitive to how how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.
Chad took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Chad maintained it was the _wrong subgenre_ of science fiction. His team was building the computer from _Star Trek_, not _A Fire Upon the Deep_: tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a piecewise linear function to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a piecewise linear function fitted to _the entire internet_, previous generations must have found it equally counterintuitive to how how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.