I don’t have a PhD either lol. Your beliefs aren’t meaningless either. Nobody actually knows what breakthrough we might have next. I do consider chatgpt to be a breakthrough tbh (using RL to train an LLM). VQA was a breakthrough imo. GANs was also a breakthrough. All these came about in the same way as the post suggests but without hardware or funding u would never see all of it come together.

There’re people like Blake Richards working on the boundaries of neuroscience and AI but it’s hard to work on any of those fields without math as the underlying structure. Still, even if you approach it or want to approach it from an entirely new way it’s hard to do that without knowing the approaches that do exist which would require you to have a lot of math knowledge regardless. You can do that without a degree for sure tho , that wasn’t my point. It’s just super hard without guidance and the primary topic of this post is: working on smaller problems without any funding , I don’t see how that works and i don’t see any actual pragmatic answers here by op either.