> recently got a lot of traction This flips causality - funding didn't really really pick up until the last 5 years or so - about two years after the initial

> recently got a lot of traction This flips causality - funding didn't really really pick up until the last 5 years or so - about two years after the initial breakthrough. Look, I agree with this comment - managers are super eager to apply ML to tasks it has no business being applied to (at least yet). But your original claim was that all the new techniques are just glorified maximum likelihood optimization. That's just false.