That has to be said again. Basically all of deep learning, which is what people mainly mean today when they say "ML", is at least 20 years old. Other data scien

That has to be said again. Basically all of deep learning, which is what people mainly mean today when they say "ML", is at least 20 years old. Other data science techniques? Even older. The big spurt seen recently is mainly the result of a) faster hardware and b) larger datasets [1]. At some point the "low-hanging fruit" achievable by scaling up and crunching down MOAR DATA will be all taken and then soemone will need to do all the hard work of figuring out new techniques, or at least building bigger computers. Who's going to do that? All the people who are "passionate about machine learning" and are experts in Tensorflow and PyTorch? I wouldn't bet my money on that. Thirty years from now the people leading the field will be people with thirty years of experience in thinking real hard about real hard problems. As they usually are [2]. __________________ [1] My standard reference for this is a guy called Geoff Hinton. Some people in machine learning may have heard the name. Quoting: AMT: Ok, so you have been working on neural networks for decades but it has only exploded in its application potential in the last few years, why is that? Geoffrey Hinton: I think it’s mainly because of the amount of computation and the amount of data now around but it’s also partly because there have been some technical improvements in the algorithms. Particularly in the algorithms for doing unsupervised learning where you’re not told what the right answer is but the main thing is the computation and the amount of data. http://techjaw.com/2015/06/07/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-in-baby-steps-and-the-future-of-google-and-ai/ http://techjaw.com/2015/06/07/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-... [2] Check out the birth dates of the current generation of deep learning luminaries. Geoff Hinton: 1947. Yoshua Bengio: 1964. Yann LeCun: 1960. Jurgen Schmidhuber: 1963. It goes on. Go ahead and tell those guys they're greybeards who don't get what the kids today are doing.