Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Chintala: Smell and touch digitization is where images were in 1920

Soumith Chintala · Open Source AI is AI we can Trust — with Soumith Chintala of Meta AI · Mar 6, 2024 · at 1:30:23

Soumith Chintala, creator of PyTorch and Meta AI Fellow, compares the maturity of audio and vision computing to digital olfaction and touch.

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“When we think about audio, or images, or video, they're, like, so advanced that we have the concept of color spaces, we have the concept of, like, frequency spectrums, like, you know, we figured out how ears process, like frequencies in mouse spectrum, or whatever, like, logarithmically scaled. Images were like RGB, YUV, like we have so many different kinds of parameterizations. We have formalized these two senses ridiculously well. Touch and smell. Nada. We're like where we were with images in, say, in 1920, or maybe even the 1800, right?”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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