I mean, there was also a period in mainstream deep learning (e.g. NLP) where the established professors were the people commanding the highest salaries, startup funding, etc., but the field shifted as empiricism started to eat methodological cleverness, which in turn changed the types of people who excelled. Fewer academic types, more quant types, and a wave of younger people who could quickly pick up new methodologies. But we're still basically in a pre-empiricism era for robotics, so the ecosystem feels biased towards academics, like how it felt in NLP in 2017.
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