Agreed, but the black-box experimentation seems like it’s plausibly a prerequisite for actual understanding? E.g. you couldn’t analyze InceptionV1 or CLIP to understand its inner workings before you actually had those models. To use your car engine metaphor from the other comment, we can’t open the engine and stick it full of sensors before we actually have the engine. And now that we do have engines, people are starting to stick them full of sensors, even if most of the work is still focused on building even fancier engines.
It seems reasonable to expect that as long as there are low-hanging fruit to be picked using black boxes, we get a lot of black boxes and the occasional paper dedicated to understanding what’s going on with them and how they work. Then when it starts getting harder to get novel interesting results with just black box tinkering, the focus will shift to greater theoretical understanding and more thoroughly understanding everything that we’ve accomplished so far.
Agreed, but the black-box experimentation seems like it’s plausibly a prerequisite for actual understanding? E.g. you couldn’t analyze InceptionV1 or CLIP to understand its inner workings before you actually had those models. To use your car engine metaphor from the other comment, we can’t open the engine and stick it full of sensors before we actually have the engine. And now that we do have engines, people are starting to stick them full of sensors, even if most of the work is still focused on building even fancier engines.
It seems reasonable to expect that as long as there are low-hanging fruit to be picked using black boxes, we get a lot of black boxes and the occasional paper dedicated to understanding what’s going on with them and how they work. Then when it starts getting harder to get novel interesting results with just black box tinkering, the focus will shift to greater theoretical understanding and more thoroughly understanding everything that we’ve accomplished so far.