Comment by renjimen

As a consultant data scientist who attended NeurIPS this year I was surprised at how few of the talks and posters covered innovations practically applicable outside of niche domains. Those that did (DL for tabular data, joint LLM training with RAG, time series foundational models) were swamped with attendees. It's not that there aren't jobs for innovators, it's just that there needs to be some amount of applicability of your research outside the theory of learning.