Comment by alyxya
4 months ago
The notion of inventing or creating something in ML doesn't seem very important as many people can independently come up with the same idea. Conversely, you can create novel results just by reviewing old literature and demonstrating it in a project.
That's how all/most science normally works.
Conversely, a huge amount of science is just scientists going "here's something I found interesting" but no one can figure out what to do with it. Then 30 or 100 years go by and it's a useful in a field that didn't even exist at the time.
It doesn’t apply to empirical science because there’s a lot more variation in observations. The variation of ideas in ML model architecture is limited by being theoretical.