alt Hacker News> I compared to a 10-year old CNN and to my surprise found that this was superior.
I'm surprised he's surprised.
> A small, old, specialised network using an outdated architecture recognises skin lesions far better than two frontier LLMs.
Yes of course. A 30m params Katago network with one playout is superhuman in playing go, while frontier LLMs have over 10,000 times more parameters and aren't any good at playing go. They're good at other things (such as helping you create a network that's good at playing go).
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In other news, a 10 year old outdated box of matches is better at starting a fire than a 2026 state-of-the-art high-power flashlight.
I think the reason I am surprised is that they are exceptionally good at interpreting images generally and there are tens of thousands of labeled skin cancer images on the public internet so I had assumed the general image interpretation abilities would transfer
such as helping you create a network that's good at playing go
This is really what’s happening right now… LLMs are excellent computer users. Which makes one of the frontiers “amazing things computers always could have done, but we lacked the programmers to do”.
If basically anyone can train a high quality CNN for just about any purpose now, what new opportunities appear that computers can help with?
A CNN is also definitely not an “outdated architecture” when it comes to image classification