Comment by fdr
7 months ago
I think it's pretty funny because, for example, Katalin Karikó was thought to be working in some backwater, on this "mRNA" thing, that could barely get published before COVID...and, the original LLM/transformer people were well qualified but not pulling quarter billion dollars kicking around trying to improve machine translation of languages, a time-honored AI endeavor going back to the 1950s. The came upon something with outstanding empirical properties.
For whatever reason, remuneration seems more concentrated than fundamentals. I don't begrudge those involved their good luck, though: I've had more than my fair share of good luck in my life, it wouldn't be me with the standing to complain.
There's a ton of examples like this, and it is quite common in Nobel level work. You don't make breakthroughs by maintaining the status quo. Unfortunately that means to do great things you can't just "play it safe"