[D] Is Active Learning a "hoax", or the future?

There is ever-increasing talk of "intelligent sampling" techniques (aka "active learning"), especially in the vision domain involving unlimited data (e.g. edge use-cases).

This topic becomes even more pressing in the era of data-hungry foundational models.

However, most industry & academic resources on this topic seem to report a 2-4% performance increase above naive random sampling, **at best**!

Is 2-4% substantial? Or do we expect this number to increase in the future?

academic active learning cases data edge future hoax industry intelligent machinelearning performance report resources sampling talk vision