The vast majority of work is plumbing, but there are still new things.
What matters isn't making new things, it's making new things that work, and bringing them all the way to completion.
The vast majority of innovation isn't exciting discovery, it's coming up with tests to convince yourself you actually did what you thought you did and sharing those results with regulators. That's the difference between Theranos and GRAIL.
I just built a tardigrade detector neural network; nobody has done that exact thing before, and now i'm talking to the world's leading tardigrade researcher because my tool might be helpful in answering an unanswered important tardigrade question.
But thousands if not millions of individuals worked over hundreds to thousands of years to bring us that tardigrade detector; all I did was take advantage of that to label 100 images! I've tried being an ML researcher; my conclusion is the best models are distilled from postdoc tears, and we merely retrain those models without pain.
What matters isn't making new things, it's making new things that work, and bringing them all the way to completion.
The vast majority of innovation isn't exciting discovery, it's coming up with tests to convince yourself you actually did what you thought you did and sharing those results with regulators. That's the difference between Theranos and GRAIL.
I just built a tardigrade detector neural network; nobody has done that exact thing before, and now i'm talking to the world's leading tardigrade researcher because my tool might be helpful in answering an unanswered important tardigrade question.
But thousands if not millions of individuals worked over hundreds to thousands of years to bring us that tardigrade detector; all I did was take advantage of that to label 100 images! I've tried being an ML researcher; my conclusion is the best models are distilled from postdoc tears, and we merely retrain those models without pain.