I am a first year MSc student in Computer Science, supervised by a young AP conducting research on SSL(self-supervised learning). However, I have a lot of doubts about the practical usefulness of this field. I think I'll do a PhD, but have no plans to enter academia. I want to be productive in industry.
An example of an exciting industrial application of ML is that OpenAI created ChatGpt.
But for SSL and RL(reinforcement learning), the papers I've seen are basically about programs to play Atari games and MineCraft. It's very far from being practical and changing society.
I googled the problem, and it looks like the only industrial applications for SSL and RL are autonomous driving and healthcare, but I'm not interested in those.
What other industrial applications are there for SSL/RL?