Not OP, but relevant—I spent the last ~6 months going to meetings with [biggest name at a top-20 ML university]’s group. He seems to me like a clearly very smart guy (and very generous in allowing me to join), but I thought it was quite striking that almost all his interests were questions of the form “I wonder if we can get a model to do x”, or “if we modify the training in way y, what will happen?” A few times I proposed projects about “maybe if we try z, we can figure out why b happens” and he was never very interested—a near exact quote of his in response was “even if we figured that out successfully, I don’t see anything new we could get [the model] to do”.
At one point I explicitly asked him about his lack of interest in a more general theory of what neural nets are good at and why—his response was roughly that he’s thought about it and the problem is too hard, comparing it to P=NP.
To be clear, I think he’s an exceptionally good ML researcher, but his vision of the field looks to me more like a naturalist studying behavior than a biologist studying anatomy, which is very different from what I expected (and from the standard my shoulder-John is holding people to).
Not OP, but relevant—I spent the last ~6 months going to meetings with [biggest name at a top-20 ML university]’s group. He seems to me like a clearly very smart guy (and very generous in allowing me to join), but I thought it was quite striking that almost all his interests were questions of the form “I wonder if we can get a model to do x”, or “if we modify the training in way y, what will happen?” A few times I proposed projects about “maybe if we try z, we can figure out why b happens” and he was never very interested—a near exact quote of his in response was “even if we figured that out successfully, I don’t see anything new we could get [the model] to do”.
At one point I explicitly asked him about his lack of interest in a more general theory of what neural nets are good at and why—his response was roughly that he’s thought about it and the problem is too hard, comparing it to P=NP.
To be clear, I think he’s an exceptionally good ML researcher, but his vision of the field looks to me more like a naturalist studying behavior than a biologist studying anatomy, which is very different from what I expected (and from the standard my shoulder-John is holding people to).
EDITED—removed identity of Professor.