In Lecture 14 on self-supervised learning, the discussion revolves around pretext tasks that enable models to learn useful features without manual labeling, focusing on methods like rotation prediction, inpainting, and colorization. It highlights the evaluation of learned features based on their effectiveness in downstream tasks such as classification and detection, rather than on the accuracy of the pretext tasks themselves. The lecture also addresses challenges in creating pretext tasks and the potential for developing more general tasks for feature learning.