Well you can’t just state “this isn’t a paper” at a beginning of a paper to get an exemption from the rules and traditions of scientific discourse. It’s like the people believing it’s not a crime to pay with counterfeit money if the signature reads “Donald Duck”.
It s not the same at all. You can make a blog post or an HN comment, or really anything and put it out there without following the rules of science journals. This is the essentially a blog post in PDF
It's a position paper, academics publish them all the time, they're very much a part of scientific discourse. Just different than an experimental results paper.
LeCun claims four "main original contributions" and Schmidhuber basically debunks them one by one, for example:
> (IV) your predictive differentiable models "for hierarchical planning under uncertainty" - you write: "One question that is left unanswered is how the configurator can learn to decompose a complex task into a sequence of subgoals that can individually be accomplished by the agent. I shall leave this question open for future investigation."
> Far from a future investigation, I published exactly this over 3 decades ago: a controller NN gets extra command inputs of the form (start, goal). An evaluator NN learns to predict the expected costs of going from start to goal. A differentiable (R)NN-based subgoal generator also sees (start, goal), and uses (copies of) the evaluator NN to learn by gradient descent a sequence of cost-minimizing intermediate subgoals [HRL1].
