>> Unfortunately for us (or at least me, because why did I spend so much time learning this stuff?), many top ML or AI researchers have only a vague understanding of fundamentals, and I vehemently disagree that you need rigorous exposure to mathematics to contribute to ML or AI.
But that depends on what you mean by "contribute". Machine learning research has turned into a circus with clowns and trained donkeys and the majority of the "contributions" suffer heavily from what John McCarthy called the "look ma, no hands disease" of AI:
Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all[1].
Yes, anyone can contribute to that kind of thing without any understanding of what they're doing. Which is exactly what's happening. You say that "many top ML or AI researchers have only a vague understanding of fundamentals" matter-of-factly but while it certainly is fact, it's a fact that should ring every single alarm bell.
The progress we saw in deep learning at the start of the decade certainly didn't come from researchers with "only a vague understanding of fundamentals"! People like Hinton, LeCun, Schmidhuber and Bengio have a deep background not only in computer science and AI but in other disciplines also (Hinton was trained in psychology, if memory serves). Why should we expect any progress to come from people with a "vague understanding" of the fundamentals of their very field of knowledge? In what historical circumstance was knowlege enriched by ignorance?
But that depends on what you mean by "contribute". Machine learning research has turned into a circus with clowns and trained donkeys and the majority of the "contributions" suffer heavily from what John McCarthy called the "look ma, no hands disease" of AI:
Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all[1].
Yes, anyone can contribute to that kind of thing without any understanding of what they're doing. Which is exactly what's happening. You say that "many top ML or AI researchers have only a vague understanding of fundamentals" matter-of-factly but while it certainly is fact, it's a fact that should ring every single alarm bell.
The progress we saw in deep learning at the start of the decade certainly didn't come from researchers with "only a vague understanding of fundamentals"! People like Hinton, LeCun, Schmidhuber and Bengio have a deep background not only in computer science and AI but in other disciplines also (Hinton was trained in psychology, if memory serves). Why should we expect any progress to come from people with a "vague understanding" of the fundamentals of their very field of knowledge? In what historical circumstance was knowlege enriched by ignorance?
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[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi...