I think neural nets are just a subset of machine learning techniques.
I wonder what would have happened if we poured the same amount of money, talent and hardware into SVMs, random forests, KNN, etc.
I don't say that transformers, LLMs, deep learning and other great things that happened in the neural network space aren't very valuable, because they are.
But I think in the future we should also study other options which might be better suited than neural networks for some classes of problems.
Can a very large and expensive LLM do sentiment analysis or classification? Yes, it can. But so can simple SVMs and KNN and sometimes even better.
I saw some YouTube coders doing calls to OpenAI's o1 model for some very simple classification tasks. That isn't the best tool for the job.
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