I empathize with LeCunn but he is a prime example of why scientists often make poor leaders. It’s too tempting to always do the cool and interesting thing instead of drilling down on the boring but reliable thing that actually creates value. There is of course a place for this kind of eternal curiosity and I hope he’s found it, but hyper-competitive industry may not be it.

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GIFtheory a day ago | parent | next [-]

Ironically, Yann is kind of known in academic circles for being the guy working on boring, unsexy stuff (deep learning) when all the other academics were doing sexy cutting edge SVMs and stuff. That’s probably why he got the Meta job in the first place.

	▲	johnnyanmac a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, being a trendsetter pretty much means you had to be working on something boring and unsexy at first. I can't really remember the last time a major innovation came because someone knew exactly what to invent, everyone agreed it was important, and we all ran full speed ahead on it. Perhaps the atomic bomb? Not being alarmist, but that seems like one of the few instances in modern history. I also thought of the space race, but even rockets as an innovative concept started centuries beforehand as a tool of war.

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srean a day ago | parent | prev [-]

They have different jobs.

For a corporation it is to make money.

For a researcher it is to explore and illuminate. That this exploration and illumination often leads to a landfall of new wealth generation is a happy accident. This ensures that the monied class would bet some of their capital on them, at least the wise ones.