Comment by cubefox
15 days ago
I think machine learning research is more like engineering, where you do need some math, but you don't need a physics degree. You don't need to understand everything first to discover that some engineering solutions work and others don't. And most abstract theories likely wouldn't have helped you anyway because they are not sufficiently concrete to apply to what you are doing in practice.
To make some progress in ML you might not need a lot of theory, but to understand why things work – you absolutely do. Moreover, the DL field as a whole desperately needs theories explaining what’s going on in these large models.