The Age of Neural Network Technicians?

We know that the steam engine was developed before the Law of Thermodynamics were discovered. Many will rightly say that in world of Data Science the artifact is ahead of the theory as famously said by Yann LeCun in his Turing Prize lecture.

Increasingly we are finding new variety of AI Engineers/Neural Network Operators who have almost skipped Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science and jumped into the field of LLMs. While this may be fine for end-users, I am unsure about the foundations of such a career.

I am convinced that the Scientists will outlast the Neural Network Operators. What do you think?

Note: “The Affective Growth of Computer Vision” by Su and Crandall (CVPR 2021) is a thought provoking paper. The term “Neural Network Operator” is taken from this paper.

Aniruddha M Godbole is an inter-disciplinary expert. He is a continuous learner. These are his personal views.