I did my Masters in ML and a decade ago it seemed AI was so exciting. You could build relatively good models at home. Our university had a cluster that could train SOTA models. It seemed like every year we were discovering a breakthrough new neural net structure.

Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.

It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)

I always thought the ML stuff was boring... Computational Neuroscience on the other hand ;)