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François Chollet Profile picture
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6 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Deep learning for auto-captioning 👍👍👍
This said "abstraction and reasoning in AI systems", but the alternative version is actually more interesting
The *Ice systems* is the name of an extensive network of galleries on the icy moon Europa, built eons ago by a long-gone culture. In the cavernous tunnels, a mere whisper can echo over incredible distances...
The Watchers, scouts able to move in complete silence through these labyrinths, are trained to listen to the Voices of the Ice. Night after night, they work tirelessly to alert their fellow nomads when the Ykhors are approaching

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François Chollet Profile picture
2 Dec
~277k dead from Covid in the US so far. Real number probably somewhat higher. Will be over 500k by the time it's over. It didn't have to turn out this way
This is obviously the biggest news story this year. The second biggest being the continued march of climate change and the devastation in its wake
The attacks on democracy and the rule of law only make it to third place, so it's kind of a bad year
Read 4 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
21 Nov
One of the most difficult things to master in a foreign language: cases where the target language uses multiple words (subcategories) for a concept for which your previous languages only have one word. You're simply not used to parse reality into these new subcategories.
A simple example would be counters in Japanese. In European languages, a counter is just a number, so you would say, "three birds, three peanuts, three sheets of paper, three pens, three cars". In Japanese, a counter conveys not just quantity but also various object properties
So you would say, sanba (birds and bunnies), sanko (generic small thing), sanmai (flat thing), sanbon (cylindrical thing), sandai (large vehicle), etc. In fact there are more distinct counters than I can count. It takes a long time to get used to these distinctions
Read 5 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
20 Nov
A few neat things in the next TF release:

- The Keras mixed precision API moves to stable
- Multi-worker mirrored distribution support moves to stable
- Experimental support for parameter server distribution in Keras
- Full NumPy API implementation (tf.experimental.numpy)
Using mixed precision: tensorflow.org/guide/mixed_pr…
Using parameter server distribution: tensorflow.org/tutorials/dist…
Read 4 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
15 Nov
The territory, the map, and the cartographer each belong in entirely different categories. Yet, we tend to confuse them with each other

The thing, the abstraction that captures an actionable aspect of the thing, and the intelligence that is capable of generating new abstractions
In particular, don't confuse a model and the ability to produce new models. Humans excel at operationalizing the abstractions they invent into highly effective machines, but so far our machines have close to zero ability to generate abstractions of their own
A road takes you from A to B, but a road-building company takes you from anywhere to anywhere else.

An operationalized abstraction solves the task for which it was designed, but intelligence -- the ability to produce abstractions -- can solve arbitrary tasks
Read 4 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
11 Nov
In a majority-democrat country, nearly 100% of top performing FB content consists of far-right propaganda and conspiracies.

Is it because only hardcore right wingers use FB anymore, or is it because FB recommendations amplify far-right propaganda at the expense of all else?
Do Trump-supporting FB board members and executives have a say in what their algorithm promotes? In fact, they do.

motherjones.com/media/2020/10/…
I don't think History will remember someone like Lecun as a convnet pioneer. He will be remembered as the man who was in charge of AI at Facebook during the decade when Facebook's algorithms weakened democracy worldwide and triggered a global wave of far-right populism.
Read 6 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
8 Nov
Empathy is good. Calls for unity are good. But let's stop pretending that the "two sides" are symmetrical and morally equivalent. Stop saying, "oh, you think X is bad, but the other side just thinks the same about you".

Along every dimension, the picture is incredibly lopsided.
Maybe the most glaring asymmetry is what was at stake in this election. Biden won, and Trump supporters have nothing to fear from this result. In policy terms, they'll actually end up better off.

Had Trump won, many people would have definitely not been ok. Lives were at stake.
And no, CNN & NYT are not equivalent to Fox News.

Conspiracy theories against Biden's family are not equivalent to Trump's actual corruption.

Antiracism activists are not equivalent to far-right militias.

Life-saving medical facts are not equivalent to life-endangering lies.
Read 5 tweets

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