This thread is on a public forum(Twitter) between two scientists.

Person1 – [Director of #AI #research @nvidia, Bren #Professor @Caltech, Fmr Principal scientist @awscloud]

Person2 – Research Scientist at Deepmind

Both are entitled to their own opinions. Here’s how the thread goes…

Person1(talking about her newly published work): DeepLearning is only good at interpolation. But applications need extrapolation that can reason about more complex scenarios than it is trained on. With current methods, accuracy degrades rapidly when complexity of test instances grows. Our new work aims to overcome this…

Person2: This tweet really downplays prior work. NTM, memory nets, Neural GPU, MANN, graph nets, and many, many other related methods also degrade gracefully. Your work looks like an important next step, but this rhetoric is unhelpful.

Person1: What you are doing is rhetoric and rude. We have mentioned all prior work in our paper. You don’t want to engage in science. It is inevitable to get attacked online as a woman. #deepmind can engage in all kind of media hype that is unethical but I get attacked for stating facts. As a woman stating science, I get accused of engaging in rhetoric.

I personally feel this response by Person1 to be extremely out of the blue. Putting aside the fact that Person1 is a Director @ NVIDIA + some title at Caltech and Person2 is a scientist as well @Google, let’s look at the simple conversation here. The thread started with a tweet about an interesting work. That was followed by a review directed only at the tweet being rhetoric. And it was then replied with something unimaginable. Am I the only one looking at this all confused?

Source post: https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1194338388221972480