GANs will change the world

It’s New Year’s 2017, so time to make predictions. Portfolio diversification has never been me, so I’ll make just one.

Generative Adversarial Networks — GANs for short — will be the next big thing in deep learning, and GANs will change the way we look at the world.

Specifically, adversarial training will change how we think about teaching AIs complex tasks. In a sense, they are learning how to imitate an expert. You know you’ve reached sufficient mastery of a task once an expert discriminator can not tell the difference between your outputs, and those that you were learning to imitate. This probably does not apply to large tasks like writing a paper — everyone’s final product is a little bit different, but adversarial training will be an essential tool for making progress on mid-sized outputs like writing sentences and paragraphs, and it’s already one of the keys to realistic image generation.

In a