Why does it make you sad? It seems intuitiv and simple. And in reality of course the optimisation part is not trivial. What would we better if the "it" was more complicated?
You would get into natural language modelling because you had a deep love of language. Because you think you're close to figuring language out in a systematic way, with just a few years more study.
There's a certain sadness, I think, in the revelation that the robots don't need the expertise of humanity's greatest experts and masters, they just need us to click all the squares that contain a motorcycle.
As an aside, it's wild how people put their own spin onto what I said.
Obviously I should have been clearer :shrug:.
What's sadder is coming into a field pre-deciding that the way you approach it "is the right way" and can't tolerate that different mindsets can also get results.
It makes me sad when people rediscover things (with massive compute in this case), that were already known.
It's very much spend a year in the lab to save an hour in the library.