Or does it ? Drawing on a parallel from my experience in NLP during the early 2000s, the field was largely dominated by linguists trying to grok language and structuring rules manually. However, the most significant advancements came when we shifted towards using massive datasets to train models, without requiring explicit, deep linguistic knowledge.

Similarly, maybe the next frontier in 3D vision is employing large datasets to train a black-box AI without us having to understand and get the math right.