> making you not consider other techniques that might work better Currently, DL is the most powerful technique for many problem types. I think for a beginner,

> making you not consider other techniques that might work better Currently, DL is the most powerful technique for many problem types. I think for a beginner, learning that is a safe bet, the "next thing" is likely to be an elaboration on DL. It's good if some people ignore the hype, they may come up with the next paradigm going in a completely different direction from DL. But the people doing that won't be beginners. They'll be people with similar levels of experience as Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, etc. Those well rounded people with deep theoretical knowledge will make the big breakthroughs. Beginners should start with what we know works well now, and expand out. > [Other techniques may be] simpler and work just as good This is a much better reason to learn other things than DL. Efficiency and lower complexity if you know the problem domain is amenable to the technique.