As someone familiar with the field, you likely know this already, but the similarities between the Karpathy post from 2015 and this work from OpenAI is likely because Karpathy is a founder and lead researcher at OpenAI.
Re:Unsupervised sentiment neuron
by eanzenberg on Thursday April 06, 2017 @08:58PM
(#14056162)
Ya but he's surprisingly absent from being a paper author.
If they're getting better results than the previous state of the art, I think the most important point of this research is its critique of previous papers! The previous state of the art research needs to consider such old, basic techniques to improve their own results.
> Hype is an interesting thing especially when it comes from laymen.
Agreed, as can attributing value to said hype.
An argument can generally be made for many things for why they "can be useful, in X situation" (like 'a layperson understand ML'), doesn't mean it has value in every context.
(Or even that it's a particularly good example for its contrived purpose - just that it could/might suffice if nothing better exists.)
http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ towards the end has similar methodology and is 1.5 years old.
Hype is an interesting thing especially when it comes from laymen.