I strongly believe this is a typical case of “lost in translation”. What Loïc Cordone really wanted to express (although he seems to have wrongly translated this into English from his native French) was most likely that BrainChip
had claimed something,
NOT that they had pretended! Big difference!
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[While this box contains two spelling mistakes, it doesn’t concern the accuracy of the statement about this pair of false friends. The author uses the accent aigu (é) correctly on the prefix in prétendre and prétend, but at the same time incorrectly, when he/she writes preténdre twice, just in case anyone wondered…]
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Maybe
you should dig a little deeper, before making such a statement?
Firstly, you are doing this guy an injustice by alleging he is “almost a perpetual student”. After graduating with a “diplôme d’ingénieur, mathématiques et informatique” (which is equivalent to a Master’s degree) in 2019, he did a PhD on Bio-Inspired AI at LEAT (Laboratoire d’Électronique, Antennes et Télécommuncations), a joint research unit between the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (renamed Université Côte d’Azur in 2019) and the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), while working as a researcher at the Renault Software Factory (October 2019 - January 2023). Such industrial PhDs are quite common these days.
Since April 2023, he has been employed as an ML researcher in the field of GenAI at Shift Technology.
“Almost a perpetual student”?
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Secondly, when Loïc Cordone defended his PhD thesis in mid-December 2022, the BrainChip video he refers to in his thesis (which he had obviously submitted even earlier that year - there is normally a timespan of at least a couple of months between PhD thesis submission and defense) was just over a year old (
BrainChip Demonstrates Smart Automotive, Oct. 2021), and he was factually correct when commenting on the lack of peer-reviewed papers by fellow researchers who had used Akida (and thus the lack of benchmarking of neuromorphic hardware that included Akida)
at the time.
You, however, unfairly judge him as if he had written his PhD thesis in 2024.
The way I see it, Loïc Cordone’s verdict on Akida is not at all what you think it is. He did not intend to accuse BrainChip of lying about Akida’s capabilities, but instead included Akida in his table on neuromorphic hardware at a time when a lot of other academic researchers wouldn’t have mentioned BrainChip at all in their papers.
He then went on to say “These different neuromorphic hardware represent exciting and promising leads for the implementation of neuromorphic process toolchains…”. Which included Akida.
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IMO it all makes sense when we simply blame the native French speaking author (and those who possibly proofread his thesis) for not paying enough attention to the false friends prétendre vs to pretend, when writing his thesis in English.
All in all - the way I see it - he was actually positive about Akida, presenting it in a table with other, much better researched neuromorphic hardware at the time (2022).
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