[auggierose]

I guess it depends on what you trying to do. I had a computer vision problem where I was like, hell yeah, let's machine learn the hell out of this. 2 months later, and the results were just not precise enough. It took me 2 more months, and now I am solving the task easily on an iPhone via Apple Metal in milliseconds with a hand-crafted optimisation approach ...

[jefft255]

His advice really concerns more scientific research and its long-term progress, and not really immediate applications. I think that injecting human knowledge can lead to faster, more immediate progress, and he seems to believe that too. The "bitter lesson" is that general, data-driven approaches will always win out eventually.