LINK: AI Researcher Yann LeCun on AI function

Shmi

Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:

"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."

rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.

Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:

Agreed. And search is not the same problem as prediction, you can have a big search problem even when evaluating/predicting any single point is straightforward.

search is not the same problem as prediction

It is when what you are predicting is the results of a search. Prediction covers searching.

7V_V12y

They are not the same problem but they are highly related: If you have a very good heuristic, then search is trivial, and learning good heuristics from data is a prediction problem. On the other hand, prediction problems such as Structured prediction (the stuff LeCun does) entail search, and moreover most machine learning algorithms also require some kind of search in the training phase.