That's unfortunate. My personal sense is that while agentic LLM's are not going to get us close to AGI, a few relatively modest architectural changes to the underlying models might actually do that, and I do think mimicry of our own self-referential attention is a very important component of that.

While the current AI boom is a bubble, I actually think that AGI nut could get cracked quietly by a company with even modest resources if they get lucky on the right fundamental architectural changes.

I agree - and I think having interdisciplinary approach here is going to increase the odds here. There is a ton of useful knowledge in related disciplines - often just named differently - but turns out investigating the same problem from a different angle.

Sounds like those ML "scientists" were actually just engineers.

A lot of progress is made through engineering challenges

This is also "science"

Make sure the ML scientists don't take credit for your work. Sometimes they reject a paper so they can work on it on their own.

Grant reviews are blind reviews - so you don’t know. Also - and even worse - there is no rebuttal process. It gets rejected without you having a chance to clarify / convince reviewers.

Instead you’d need to resubmit and start the entire process from scratch. What a waste of resources …

It’s the final nail what made me quit pursuing a scientific career path despite having good pubs & PhD /w honours.

Unfortunately it’s what I enjoy the most.