[antics]

I just meant that there are lots of problems where I think TCS could have contributed but didn't, because the relevant analysis was not acceptable at FOCS or SODA (or whatever). A good example is the original transformers paper, which is vastly over-complicated relative to (say) a later treatment[1] by Ruslan Salakhutdinov's lab, which shows that attention is "just" plain-old Nadaraya-Watson kernel smoothing—which if you don't know is a weighted average of points covered in elementary grad stats.

I'm not saying it was TCS people would be "better" at discovering this or anything like that, I'm just saying that the opportunity for contribution from TCS people is very high, and because the fields are not well-integrated you often have to wait years to uncover what ML concepts "really" are. I think working together would benefit both ML and TCS!

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.11775