>this stuff existed for decades and it hit a wall. >sampling is slow. Right. Sampling is slow. That's why automated variational inference is a very active f

>this stuff existed for decades and it hit a wall. >sampling is slow. Right. Sampling is slow. That's why automated variational inference is a very active field of research these days: instead of approximating the posterior by sampling, you approximate it with an optimization problem whose gradient-descent provides a bound on the posterior probabilities across the parameter space. All the work on training deep neural networks has made our hardware and software very efficient at solving optimization problems.