Nobody tell him about GPT-3, I guess…? How do you write this in 2021 and not specifically confront the evidence of what modern ML systems can do and have already done?
I know the author and have worked with him. Even when a system he wrote over many months was dramatically outperformed by a naive machine learning approach that I coded up in an afternoon, it made no difference to his confidence that he was on the right path.
I am genuinely unsure whether this is a good or bad character trait.