> What is surprising about any of this? Connections between fields drive new ideas. And this has especially been the case for recent AI progress. With the spee

> What is surprising about any of this? Connections between fields drive new ideas. And this has especially been the case for recent AI progress. With the speed at which the field is moving, ideas that are obvious to some still have a significant chance of not being tried yet. Just as the connection between the Kalman filter and RNN models or the significant similarities between back-propagation and the whole field of control theory. If it's truly not surprising, then that's just another reason to try it out if nobody else has. Does everything always need to be immediately "useful"?