Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 73 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#51

Post by alehul »

According to a recent interview with OpenAI from YC's blog [1], they believe that an engineer without any AI/ML experience can be productive on their team from Day 1, and that AI/ML makes up 'virtually none' of the work. The vast majority of the work is apparently in building the infrastructure to support it.

In conclusion, it'll be an easy transition and you can provide most of the value an AI/ML company needs through pure engineering.

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-dota-bots-that-beat-pro...

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#52

Post by masukomi »

Think of it this way: how many useful tools can be described by a simple CRUD app? How many of those actually NEED AI? Does the HR software need AI to show an org list, or manage the company calendar? What about banking software? What about just about every other app out there? Sure, you can get creative and think of many ways these could be enhanced by AI, but realistically there's going to be a demand for simple AI-free software long after we are all dead. And even when you do have HR software with AI built in, 90% of the app is still going to be simple CRUD stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#54

Post by stumblers »

minimaxir wrote: post #20

Although having AI/ML expertise is obviously overkill for most engineers, understanding the concepts and limitations of AI/ML is a helpful skill for any engineering field. (specifically it is not a magic spell that can solve any problem no matter what) But don’t say “I took Andrew Ng’s Coursera class and now I’m an expert on AI/ML!” like many engineers tend to do nowadays.

Agree on this point, but I'd add that you should do it only you're genuinely curious and not just because you have to. I'm finishing the Udacity nanodegree and while I'm not sure I'd recommend that specific program, I've really liked getting exposed to the fundamentals and concepts.

It reminds me of when I first started programming, I started seeing everything a little bit differently...I'm old and this will likely have little to no impact on my career but it's been a lot of fun.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#55

Post by myth_drannon »

owebmaster wrote: post #44
myth_drannon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, like reading HN you would think Django/Rails is what people are using for web frameworks. But actually Spring is more popular if you check StackOverflow careers for example. HN is an echo chamber of ML or JS hypes

But if you look at the trends on entreprise in the past 2-3 years, it is also moving to JS. So if HN is an echo chamber of future trends, it is good advantage for a developer to become top notch, isn't it? This is how I see HN (in the technical part).

Enterprise fully embraced Java and Spring for web and its popularity is growing.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#57

Post by tostitos1979 »

chubot wrote: post #7

If you're worried about this, I would recommend learning about the "complements" to AI -- data preparation and distributed computing. Those both involve a lot of conventional software skills. What you don't get from the flashy news articles is that a lot of ML work is programming and sys admin work: writing code to prepare the data, and a cycle of tweaking and re-running large jobs (including debugging them when they…

I do distributed computing and feel as equally dark about my prospects as the OP. You use TensorFlow, Tensor Flow Serving and call it a day? Compared to the advances in ML, systems is pretty well-mined out. The biggest excitements in the last 5 years were Docker and Kubernetes. There was a small blip of consensus systems around the time Docker was being rolled into production. I feel kinda depressed :'(

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#58

Post by stefs »

For most developers, AI/ML will be just another tool in their toolbox.

You probably use compilers and/or interpreters every day, but most programmers i know have never written one. Have you? Software Security (Web/Internet Security) is a concern and you probably know the basics and how to use the libraries, but are you a security researcher who works on new encryption algorithms for a living? Probably not. There's a lot of major technology nowadays that uses hardware acceleration; even browsers use openGL/Vulcan/DirectX for rendering. But do you need to know how to write a 3D engine?

What i'm saying is: it wont hurt to know how to use AI/ML. A few will earn their living as AI/ML researchers and developers. But will it be necessary? I don't think so. It'll be just another branch of specialization.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#59

Post by notaproblem »

Understanding AI/ML will soon become something like knowing how to use regular expressions, parser generators and other such tools. The most common cases will fade into the background as more languages and libraries support them and you'll no more consider yourself an AI/ML developer then you do a "regex" developer.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#60

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

ilaksh wrote: post #41

It's not practical to do complex math every time there is a new application of AI. So the amount of math necessary will be limited. Devs will probably shortly need to be able to use AI libraries and/or cloud systems. This may be complex and use a little math sometimes but doesn't require a math degree. Less math becomes necessary over time as off the shelf becomes more powerful. The next part is controversial but I p…

Why 2019?
Post reply on HN