Comment by bobmarleybiceps

this is part of why I think most researchers get less productive over time... Someone gets some big result during grad school or early career, get some big job from it, and then struggle to get new results of similar quality :shrug:

With ML in particular, there's also the sheer volume of people basically all looking at (essentially) the same problems... so it's kind of like monkeys with type writers spamming ideas until some work.