The following is my opinion; so bias is there. My feeling is the sub was never about academic discussions per se. The papers and academic discussions acted like vessels to carry people towards "(deep learning hype + money flow+ industry jobs)" island. In most of the earlier discussions ,if you follow them closely, you will see that there was never really a push for genuine understanding, rather people looking for easy way to earn "publication currency". Initial impression was having some kinda project or publication could land people a high-paying job. Probably later people realized that actually they don't need to worry about papers and stuff, rather doing some kinda quick LLM based project will help to land high-paying jobs even faster. I mean LLMs are currently at the peak of hype. Thus we have more random looking posts.