Compare how much time has been spent studying the two different architectures. Who knows if SNNs can displace other stuff, but I wouldn't rely on SOTA for being the benchmark. Progress has to be made and it isn't made in leaps and bounds. If you find them cool, study them more. Maybe you'll stumble onto something. Maybe you'll find an edge in a niche domain (and maybe you find that that edge can generalize more than you initially thought).
Stop worrying about displacing conventional networks and start worrying about understanding things. We chip away at this together, as a community. There's a lot we need to learn and a lot that needs to be explored. Why tie anyone's hands behind their backs?
I'm no stranger to having written papers that follow my own curiosity that didn't show any promising results.
However, I wouldn't blame "the community" for not taking my idea and building on it. There needs to be a seed of hope, a taste of future benefits, or else why is it anybody's obligation to care about something subpar?
The introducer of a novel idea needs to beat the incumbent by a large margin. This is just reality, not injustice.
The incumbent approaches usually benefit from a ton of research that might or might not be transferrable to the newcomer.
Even if many optimizations also apply to the new approaches, taking advantage of them takes a lot of work. For example, I have not yet implemented KV caches for my nanoGPTs that I'm fooling around with.
> The introducer of a novel idea needs to beat the incumbent by a large margin. This is just reality, not injustice.
It is an injustice and an impedance to scientific progress.
It is also a very odd thing to see in any technological progress. This is not a normal process btw. Generally we see S-curves and the newer technology is initially worse. That should be unsurprising given that it has had far less time and far less attention. You have to look at the potential and see if things are worth pursuing. We should not expect that to be carried by one team. If we do, we'll only have the lucky, crazy, and the big leading. That's not a great thing for science, especially if we want to claim that it is on the merit of ideas, not status.
