Too Long; Didn't Read
It started in a pub. Ian Goodfellow and his fellow doctoral students at the University of Montreal met to celebrate the completion of the 2014 academic year. Their conversation focused on the frontier of AI research: synthetic data generation; specifically, approaches that would allow a computer to produce realistic-looking images. Compared to everything machines have mastered, this problem may not seem worthy of the attention of some of the finest minds in AI research. However, they recognized the profound implications of computer’s shortcomings that lay hidden beneath the mountain of all it could accomplish.