Comment by sgt101

In fact I stopped my research in supervised learning and switched to collaborative agents ~97 because I saw ML as deadended. Agents would be the thing! (hint: not so much, so far)

I think Moore's law is interesting. Technically Moore's law is about transistor density/integration, in effect it became about CPU performance and similar phenom were seen in disc and network performance. Just now we are seeing a move in general architecture away from spinning rust and towards chip based storage - ssd's and optane (or just huge DRAM) which has been much slower than I thought, but is still happening. There will be more progress as we wring out the opportunities in architecture and network devices, but overall you are right - no more Mooore's.

Also there's been a wave of progress funded by excitement - it's really hard to see how Google justified the spend on Deepmind's TPU infastructure, but they did - in contrast to a rational investment from a research council which would never have bought into Alphazero and the rest.

There's opportunity to do more - big gaps in datasets, evaluation metrics, refinement of techniques (mac nets, adversarials etc), but it's back to hardscrabble now - and I'm interested to see if this is a Warren Buffet moment. After all, you only see who's wearing shorts when the tide goes out!