> That's the standard tier of competence you expect from Ng. Academia is always close but no cigar.
Academics do research. You should not expect an academic paper to be turned into a business or production overnight.
The first neural network, the Mark 1 Perceptron, was invented during WWII for OCR. It took 70 years of non-commercial research to bring us to the very useful multimodal LLMs of today.
> The first neural network, the Mark 1 Perceptron, was invented during WWII for OCR.
You're about a decade off, the Mark 1 Perceptron was created in 1958 [0]. The original paper (A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity) that introduced the idea however was written during WW2 (1943) [1].
It's more they had to wait for processing power to catch up.
One of my bit older friends got an AI doctorate in the 00s, and would always lament a business would never bother reading his thesis, they'd just end up recreating what he did in a few weeks themselves.
It's easy to forget now that in the 90s//00s/10s AI research was mainly viewed as a waste of time. The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades.
And on the other side, there's companies like Theranos, where you think the world will never be the same again, until you actually try the thing they're selling. Full cigar promised, but not even close.
Not saying this is the case with the OP company, but if you're ready to make sweeping generalizations about cigars like that on the basis of a commercial blog selling a product, you might as well invoke some healthy skepticism, and consider how the generalization works on both sides of the spectrum.
The whole corporation-glorifying, academia-bashing gaslighting narrative is getting very tiring lately.
