Wei-Chiu Ma

The dogma of the last decade in computer vision is that all classical algorithms should be replaced by neural networks. This has been very productive but, counterintuitively, with the latest frontier models, I find myself sometimes turning back to classical methods. If you have the training data, the dogma still holds. But there are situations where data is hard to get, there exist good classical algorithms for solving a problem, optimization methods are just better, or where some simple code just does the thing you want. When writing code was time consuming and error prone, training everything made sense. Now, that a frontier model can code up and test solutions quickly, getting a solution through coding can be faster than gathering training data and training a model. Consequently, I think there will be more hybrid approaches that blend trained models and code. We now have generic, high-level, planners that can execute sequences of lower-level tasks to solve large problems. These lower-level tasks may be solved by a neural network, a classical method, or specialized code written on the fly. It never pays to be religious about technology. The future is probably hybrid. Pick the thing that works for you.