I’m pretty sure the author is implying that the new crop of ML PhDs are just not a smart group of people - at least the level of intelligence required to do tru

I’m pretty sure the author is implying that the new crop of ML PhDs are just not a smart group of people - at least the level of intelligence required to do truly transformative things with ML in any field. I think what you’re saying is a commonly found attitude that relates to this topic: it’s pretty limiting to think a cursory knowledge of a field is sufficient to go change it. That’s likely why most “use ML to solve x” projects fail when some like AlphaFold succeed because the ML engineers truly understood the fundamental tenets of the topic and exploited it.