This is indeed the frustration

I'm waiting for some fresh group of grad students to make a breakthrough using a reinvented version of Pearls "Do" calculus or maybe they make some narrow breakthrough using BayesNets and everyone geeks out on those for a while

*I do think transformers (much like ff networks + backprop from 2012-2018) are probably a lasting software architecture for inference applications until we come up with new hardware, and move beyond GPU focused computing

It's exciting to see it all working, but disheartening how a-historical this last few years has been in AI - with the exception of Brooks, Sutton and a few other greybeards in the field who say similarly