An Observation on Generalization
Ilya Sutskever opens this Simons Institute lecture by admitting he almost gave the standard talk and decided against it. Instead he presents a set of results from years earlier at OpenAI, never published, on a question that had bothered him: supervised learning comes with a mathematical guarantee, and unsupervised learning does not. His claim is that it can, if you frame unsupervised learning as compression. This is the “Classic of the Week” pick, and it earns the label for a specific reason....