ClaimsRodney Brooks

“I must say, however, that at a two day work shop on Deep Learning last week at the National Academy of Science, the latter idea was much more in vogue, something of a backlash against exactly what Sutton is arguing.”

Rodney Brooks, blog author 19 March 2019 A Better Lesson (rodneybrooks.com)

Factual AI capabilities

At a two-day Deep Learning workshop at the National Academy of Science in the week before 2019-03-19, the view favouring task-specialised computation structures was more in vogue than pure learning with massive compute.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

Reasoning

Which view was 'more in vogue' at a workshop is subjective and not documented.

Cite this claim

Rodney Brooks, “At a two-day Deep Learning workshop at the National Academy of Science in the week before 2019-03-19, the view favouring task-specialised computation structures was more in vogue than pure learning with massive compute.” (said 19 March 2019). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_c8bee3a8ac17, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_c8bee3a8ac17

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Rodney Brooks, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Rodney Brooks

  1. Mostly true Factual 1 January 2026
    “But since 1991 I have made a distinction between two concepts where a machine, or creature can be either, neither, or both situated and embodied.”

    Since 1991 Brooks has distinguished between situatedness and embodiment as two separate properties a machine or creature can have.

  2. Mostly true Factual 1 January 2026
    “Once the pick orientation and vacuum gripper selection has been made it is really an open loop as all the work is done by the indiscriminate force of suction and the mutual compliance of the gripper…”

    Once pick orientation and vacuum gripper are selected, suction grasping is open loop, relying on suction force and compliance of gripper and object.

  3. Mostly true Factual 1 January 2025
    “Each column from bottom to top is a pure feed forward network, with no search, no iteration, no conventional algorithm at all.”

    In the 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer architecture, each column from bottom to top is a pure feed-forward network with no search, iteration or conventional algorithm.

  4. Mostly true Factual 1 January 2024
    “By March of 2023, it was clear that the next big thing had arrived in AI, and that it was Large Language Models.”

    By March 2023 it was clear that large language models were the next big thing in AI.

  5. Resolved true Factual 18 April 2023
    “@yejinchoinka is providing a “common sense” rebuttal on the @TED stage.”

    Yejin Choi gave a "common sense" rebuttal on the TED stage in April 2023.

All of them

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