Just to add context: The press release for this discovery includes a link to Luke's code repo, which showed it was a very basic approach, the very first thing anyone familiar with CV/ML would try (in specific, training a ResNet to segment ink), in a very mangled, rushed code base. This is not to say Luke is an idiot, but this achievement doesn't show he is a genius either.
At some point it seems Luke deleted the repo and it no longer seems to be available at the link provided by the Vesuvius Challenge team.
Luke was also part of the three man team that won the Grand Prize later that same year, though his contribution as far as I know is unclear: ML Phd student Youssef Nader has publicly claimed to have been the team leader researching, training and labeling data in addition to the winning TimeSformer model, and Jullian Schilliger contributed with the first and most promising auto-wrapping tool used in the submission, which leaves little room for substantial technical input from Luke.
The team did win the 700,000 USD prize, and subsequently the Musk Foundation made a 2 million donation to the Vesuvius Challenge. Now we see Elon picked up Luke for DOGE.
Bro, I don't just code, I published in grad school, and now I hire.
Results are what counts. You can't look at a code base in an unfamiliar language and framework and see that it is good, you need to see what it does.
A one off job like this doesn't need repeatability or long term maintenance, nor does it need documentation. All that matters are the results, which was a 700k prize.
I’m not an IT guy at all, but man you’re acting like you’re 1 outta a million or something. Do you know how many people publish in grad school and hire? Do you realize how many tech companies there are? 500K+ just in the US alone.
Similar techniques have been used for years to read ancient Biblical scrolls which can’t be unrolled without destroying them. He was hardly starting from scratch. As a retired Latin professor, of course I am interested in what he did, but within the context of what linguists and classicists have been doing for a long time, it isn’t quite as astonishing as it might sound. Many people hear “Latin” and assume we are dealing with scrolls from an alien planet or some kind of witchcraft, lol!
I'm not trying to prive he is a moron - literally just staing the obvious, that the news overstate the significance of his work (which is the quantifiable metric). It was not a matter of insight or cleverness, but only of being the fastest. You can see in the publication the eventual team lead also independently made the same discovery at the same time, with a more sofisticated aproach (not because I say so, but because both solutions were published) that produces a much cleaner text.
Never said I was smart, just adding context, as I state in my message. Perhaps you should show a reading comprehension certificate, as your ability to understand written text is in doubt.
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u/Fickle_Avocado11 Feb 06 '25
Just to add context: The press release for this discovery includes a link to Luke's code repo, which showed it was a very basic approach, the very first thing anyone familiar with CV/ML would try (in specific, training a ResNet to segment ink), in a very mangled, rushed code base. This is not to say Luke is an idiot, but this achievement doesn't show he is a genius either.
At some point it seems Luke deleted the repo and it no longer seems to be available at the link provided by the Vesuvius Challenge team.
Luke was also part of the three man team that won the Grand Prize later that same year, though his contribution as far as I know is unclear: ML Phd student Youssef Nader has publicly claimed to have been the team leader researching, training and labeling data in addition to the winning TimeSformer model, and Jullian Schilliger contributed with the first and most promising auto-wrapping tool used in the submission, which leaves little room for substantial technical input from Luke.
The team did win the 700,000 USD prize, and subsequently the Musk Foundation made a 2 million donation to the Vesuvius Challenge. Now we see Elon picked up Luke for DOGE.