The following passage is a musing on the futility of futurism. While I present a perspective, I am not married to it.
When I sat down to write this post, I briefly forgot how to spell “dilemma”. Fortunately, Apple’s spell-check magnanimously corrected me. But it seems likely, if I were cast away on an island without any automatic spell-checkers or other people to subject my brain to the cold slap of reality, that my spelling would slowly deteriorate.
And just yesterday, I had a strong intuition about trajectories through weight-space taken by neural networks along an optimization path. For at least ten minutes, I was reasonably confident that a simple trick might substantially lower the number of updates (and thus the time) it takes to train a neural network.
But for the ability to test my idea against an unforgiving reality, I might have become convinced of its truth. I might have written a paper, entitled “NO Need to worry about long training times in neural networks” (see real-life inspiration for farcical clickbait title). Perhaps I might have founded SGD-Trick University, and schooled the next generation of big thinkers on how to optimize neural networks.