That certainly is the case. Not for statistics specifically, but all the people at the top of the field, Bengio, LeCunn, Schmidhuber, Hinton, and so on, all have deep backgrounds in computer science, maths, psychology, statistics, physics, AI, etc. You don't get to make progress in a field as saturated as deep learning when all you know how to do is throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
I never said anything about needing to look down on anyone. Where did that come from?
My concern is that without a solid background in AI, no innovation can happen, because innovation means doing something entirely new and one cannot figure out what "entirely new" means, without knowing what has been done before. The people who "are trying out different things to see how they perform" as you say, are forced to do that because that's all you can do when you don't understand what you're doing.
I never said anything about needing to look down on anyone. Where did that come from?
My concern is that without a solid background in AI, no innovation can happen, because innovation means doing something entirely new and one cannot figure out what "entirely new" means, without knowing what has been done before. The people who "are trying out different things to see how they perform" as you say, are forced to do that because that's all you can do when you don't understand what you're doing.