Congratulations on the degree! And congratulations on identifying the clusterfuck. It’s hard to see the forest for trees.

I agree with the premise in the suggestion for “discrete AI”, but my analysis is different: I think we need continuous AI. Three reasons:

1. Biology is doing it and it’s working great.
2. Modern AI is hitting a power wall in much the same way Titanic realized too late that it couldn’t sink. We’re going to have a gigantic energy headache soon. (This is the same argument for discrete AI)
3. We simply do not understand complex dynamical systems well. Which is why the weather is so hard to predict. But the world consists of dynamical systems, so this is really where we want to push the envelope.

I’d argue helping out in the field of neuromorphics. It’s basically the combination of DL + dynamical systems, similar to how brains are computing. There’s a lot of energy to be saved (> x1000, really) and there’s a lot of new, cool hardware coming out you can help interface. And many of the new ideas in DL comes from neuromorphics (sparsity, SSMs…). We’re building up an open source community over at open-neuromorphic.org

Happy to answer any questions you have

I actually agree that the patent system could be improved a lot. Not all things are bad about it.

What do you mean with “innovation”? How would that be defined?

Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible. I agree that it’s important to protect manufacturing, but patents are not the right way to go about it for at least two reasons: (1) they block innovation by design (e-ink screens are great examples) and (2) they create a huge barrier to entry for new ideas (think about how many lawyers are making a living on this) I disagree with the senders on so many things. But patents were invented in a world of monarchies and craftsmen. Time to go!