As an immigrant, it’s easy to feel as if all of one’s problems are due to incursions from the outside world. But as was the case in China, and as is the case with just about any family anywhere on Earth, our greatest challenges often came from within.

I had to remind myself—sometimes repeatedly—that I wasn’t merely a visitor in this place.

For the foreseeable future, simply regaining an ability to express myself would be the center of my intellectual life.

The life of a scientist, like the life of an immigrant—the life of an adventurer—is one in which “home” is never a clear concept. The best work always happens on the borders, where ideas are forever trapped between coming and going, explored by strangers in strange lands, insiders and outsiders at the same time. But that’s what makes us so powerful

This, collectively, is the next North Star: reimagining AI from the ground up as a human-centered practice. I don’t see it as a change in the journey’s direction so much as a broadening of its scope. AI must become as committed to humanity as it’s always been to science. It should remain collaborative and deferential in the best academic tradition,

Finally, Yann LeCun, one of Hinton’s first students, famously applied it all to an impressively practical task: reading handwritten ZIP codes. In less than a decade, machine learning had progressed from a tenuous dream to a triumph in the real world.

It suggested that even the most complex ideas were something to share, graciously, rather than secrets to hoard.

by distributing complex behavior across a large network of simple elements, the connections between which can change over time, we can accomplish virtually limitless tasks, all while continually learning new ones, even late in life.

Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,