[solve]

What's become very clear in the past ~5 years is that we're seeing the emergence of a new field, very distinct from statistics. The closest equivalent of the new machine learning field is electrical engineering, which has now heavily shrunk. Indeed, many former EEs have made a natural transition into this new field.

The new machine learning is about building layers of components on top of each other, very much like circuits seen in EE. The "circuit" components being used are no longer well defined mathematical pieces built from the bottom up using ideal assumptions, but less well understood, somewhat black-box newer components that were built from the top down. Far more like a type of engineering than a type of statistics.

If you haven't been seeing all the latest Arvix papers, you're really missing out. It's evolved to look sharply different than statistics now.