While it's true that the basics of Deep Learning (eg ImageNet) are not that conceptually interesting, it is also worth noting people are working on tons of interesting directions within this framework combined with other ideas from AI (see eg 'Learning to Reason with Third-Order Tensor Products' - https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.12143 | 'Beyond imitation: Zero-shot task transfer on robots by learning concepts as cognitive programs' - https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.02788)