One of the most counterintuitive developments in ML research is that, despite huge amounts of resources and brain power being poured into field, state-of-the-art neural architecture search algorithms still can’t outperform pure random search.

This fact is so jarring that I’m surprised it’s not being talked about more often.

What exactly does this mean? Are we just putting out ineffective automl algorithms, or has the power of random search been completely overlooked?