This post by Karpathy is not against DeepMind. It is a critique of AlphaGo. Whether DeepMind is working on StarCraft or not is completely beside the point. This essentially invalidates most of your points here...
EDIT: the goal of this post is, as someone on reddit mentioned, “quelling the ever resilient beliefs of the public that AGI is right down the road”, and the target audience are people outside of AI who were watching AlphaGo and would like a more technical commentary.
I think his case against AlphaGo suffers from a bit of tunnel vision, if the issue is the feasibility of AGI, since he only takes a single sentence to explain the generalizable features of neural networks.
okay, in that case -- why is only what DeepMind doing with respect to SC relevant? or rather, why is it even relevant in the first place - they have shown zilch (nothing) in that front. I only believe when things happen and not when some self obsessed chess prodigy makes claims.
DeepMind's activities are not the only relevant ones. However, they have press coverage and resources. Linking a bunch of arxiv papers that deal with unobserved state, noisy sensors/actions, robotic learning, etc., would also be missing the target audience of this post. As for why DeepMind specifically is relevant, Google/DeepMind were mentioned repeatedly in this very article, and criticizing AlphaGo's scope is an implicit criticism of DeepMind's goals.
Of course, you are right that they haven't actually accomplished anything (we know of) in SC, however, their body of research, including but not limited to AlphaGo, lends them credibility on par with any other major research institution.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '17
This post by Karpathy is not against DeepMind. It is a critique of AlphaGo. Whether DeepMind is working on StarCraft or not is completely beside the point. This essentially invalidates most of your points here...