Listen to your customers, not to the HiPPO,” HiPPO being short for “highest paid person’s opinion.

Our goal is to figure out the simplest program we can write such that it will continue to write itself by reading data, without limit, until it knows everything there is to know.

A good learner is forever walking the narrow path between blindness and hallucination.

Common sense is important not just because your mom taught you so, but because computers don’t have it.

Machine learners, like all scientists, resemble the blind men and the elephant: one feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another leans against the leg and thinks it’s a tree, yet another touches the tusk and thinks it’s a bull. Our aim is to touch each part without jumping to conclusions; and once we’ve touched all of them, we will try to picture the whole elephant.

Learning is forgetting the details as much as it is remembering the important parts.

For a Bayesian, in fact, there is no such thing as the truth; you have a prior distribution over hypotheses, after seeing the data it becomes the posterior distribution, as given by Bayes’ theorem, and that’s all.

Knowledge is traded in both directions – manually entered knowledge for use in learners, induced knowledge for addition to knowledge bases – but at the end of the day the rationalist-empiricist fault line runs right down that border, and crossing it is not easy.

You could even say that the God of Genesis himself is a programmer: language, not manipulation, is his tool of creation. Words become worlds.

God created not species but the algorithm for creating species.