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Ask HN: Why isn't Alex Krizhevsky as famous as Ilya Sutskever or G.Hinton?

52 points by alexcos ↗ HN
Despite the fact that the paper is named after him(AlexNet) and from my understanding they're(the 3 people named in the title)one of the reasons that Nvidia GPU became widely used for training Alex is not as popular as his peers/mentors? What happened to him?

23 comments

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Onavo
Because those two actively self promote.
modeless
Seems like he might be retired.
dankai
oh how i wish hinton would have retired ...
globalnode
when i think of anyone, i can think of aspects of their personality that i dislike (for example, me not capitalising words or i?). but do you wish he'd retired because of his personality? or because you didnt think his contributions were worthwhile? or over-hyped?

btw i recently asked gpt this exact same question posed by op!, was quite the diplomatic response i got.

dankai
because of the things he's saying about where AI goes in the future, that the brain works like an LLM, and in particular his doomer-ism about LLMs.

he was wrong about many DL paradigms and didn't contribute in any way to the advances that brought us LLMs for at least the last decade, but now since he won the Nobel (undeservedly imo) his wrong opinions get publicity and misinform the public and decision makers.

i think it's the mark of an intellectual to recognize when the world has moved on so far that your idea of it is outdated and wrong. he missed that mark.

modeless
If he gave up on ideas because other people moved on, he would never have done the work that won the prize. It took someone very stubborn to continue working on neural nets back then.
dankai
I think thats absolutely wrong.
written-beyond
Well I haven't heard of the other two either if that counts
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cowsandmilk
One of the other two won a Nobel prize this year, so has some broader publicity.
written-beyond
:( I was just making a light hearted joke, I lost so much karma.
basiccalendar74
you can add an '/s' at the end next time to avoid ambiguity. :)
fabmilo
Doesn't make enough drama.
nomadic-coder
He likes to be away from the lime light. Here is the last interview I found: https://youtu.be/gwzwkv2hO5k
swyx
on top of this, its quite common that first authors are the "most junior people on the team who did the bulk of the work but may not have the broader perspective/longer career" (these are usually the last authors).

While AlexNet was his top single contribution, both Ilya and Geoff had much more other contributions and longer lived careers so the fame is kind of self fulfilling there (both in that he doesnt seem to have wanted it but also didn't keep up publishing groundbreaking stuff).

Alec Radford is in a similar vein in that he likes to keep a low profile, but he is subjectively much more famous in AI circles because he continued to work on things like GPT2/3, DallE, CLIP, PPO, Scaling laws, RLHF beyond just dropping GPT1 and peacing out

oivey
The magic of AlexNet has little do with Nvidia. It’s a more fundamental breakthrough than just the compute hardware used. Further, it’s not related to Nvidia either. Instead, it showed the promise of GPGPU. It just so happens that no one at the time and arguably still has a particularly competitive GPGPU offering other than Nvidia.
d3m0t3p
He is working on CNN (Convolution Neural Network) while everyone else uses transformers. Furthermore, he wasn't in the OpenAI scandal with Ilya. Third, they don't publish papers at the same rate. Ilya has 585182 citations, while Alex has 286082 (source google scholar).
royal__
286082 is still insane though
spamizbad
He and his company aren’t trying to raise money so it’s less important he becomes famous.
starchild3001
A visit to Google scholar can answer your question. Having made deeper and broader contributions to the field is usually how researchers become more famous. E.g. most PhD advisors are more renowned than their students because they've made deeper and broader contributions. This is obviously true in case of Hinton. Ilya additionally spearheaded GPT models and founded OpenAI, and is widely recognized as a visionary across his body of work.