Yann LeCun has memorably highlighted the vast, largely untapped importance of unsupervised learning with a cake metaphor. He says, “If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the icing and the cherry, but we don’t know how to make the cake.” He thinks that developing better algorithms for unsupervised learning will be essential if we are ever to achieve AGI.
