Tomáš Mikolov awarded the Medal of Merit by the President of the Czech Republic

Deserved. word2vec is a beautiful peice of science. The hypothesis behind it was so amazing. I kinda feel like everything else in LLMs (including the attention mechanism itself) is just engineering around the representation learning breakthrough that word2vec demonstrated

I remember being presented Word2Vec as an undergrad in 2016 and I could not predict the sci-fi reality that is today

Well-deserved. Even though more complex language models won in the end, his stripping down of word embedding training from RNNs/convolution models to a simple linear model was the thing that was needed for compute at the time and completely dominated the field for five years or so. I do miss the times a little where you could train a cutting-edge model with a reasonable CPU (for training embeddings with word2vec) and a single GPU (some BiLSTM or transformers before BERT).

If I remember correctly, I read somewhere he initially had a hard time getting the word2vec paper accepted at a conference.

I still in awe how could someone understand well in math, is it pure nature or nurture. Could any average possible to grasp the beauty of math, starting from high school level math understanding.

This is my first time hearing about Tomas in a while. Does anyone know what he has been up to since word2vec?

Záchranka

Why not button for pivo.

press button

get 1 pivo

tap 2 - 4 times and get 2-4 piva

tap 5 times. get 5 piv!

I met Tomas briefly in 2015, he's truly a genius.

So I guess he is the modern Thomas Midgley Jr., huh?