[yorwba]

The PISA test (at least when I took it) measures math skills in calculation, i.e. the kind of applied mathematics that academic departments write off as too trivial. Nonetheless, those are the skills that are required for Deep Learning as well as accountancy.

You could make an argument that high performers on the PISA test would find AI and accountancy too boring and would go into pure mathematics instead; but I don't think those proportions would be different between countries, so a higher potential (schoolchildren with good math skills) should still translate into more AI researchers, on average.

[AlexCoventry]

> those are the skills that are required for Deep Learning

Why do you believe that?

[yorwba]

Rereading that, I should have worded it as "those are skills that are required for Deep Learning research". There are of course a bunch of other skills you need to be successful, but you won't get far without being comfortable with linear algebra and calculus.

To answer your question, I believe that because I haven't yet seen a Deep Learning paper which did not couch its results in terms of those, even if it might not have been strictly necessary. If you do not understand the basics of current approaches, you'll have a hard time developing them further.