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My story as a self-taught AI researcher

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Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#141

Post by edanm »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #121
deepnotderp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, linear algebra is not that difficult to learn on your own, and plenty of people do. Gilbert Strang's course on OCW has made introductory linear algebra quite accessible. Things like topology (e.g. TDA, persistent homology, etc.) aren't really mainstream yet, but even then most of it isn't really "hardcore" math in the sense that you can get away with a basic understanding, e.g. what a Vietoris-Rips comp…

I work as a data engineer, and i was interested in learning some of the stuff our data scientists do so i can better communicate with them. Teaching myself some statistics was fine, probability was fine too and quite fun and surprising. Both subjects have plenty of books that allow you to understand the intuition behind the things they do without having to dive deep into the proofs. Linear algebra was and still is a…

If you haven't seen it, it might be worth checking out 3Blue1Brown's Linear Algebra YouTube series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk_zzaMoSs&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...).

I think it's exactly that kind of "intuition of what Linear algebra is and is for".

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#142

Post by [deleted] »

newswasboring wrote: post #138
TrackerFF wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you put into exploration? Here in Northern Europe you're expected to do most of your traveling in your 20's, but we also have pretty decent vacations - so the solo / friend / backpacking type of traveling gets replaced with more family friendly stuff when you start getting kids. I have lots of friends in their late 20's / early 30's that still travel the world, many times a year. But they don't have kids, and…

It's not just about traveling. It's just one of the components. This guy was a teacher, musician, maker and now DL expert. And it doesn't seem like he is settled on that yet. He is still exploring what he wants to do. Changes his life to match his interests. I lived some of my life like that. Took some non standard paths. But it is getting increasingly hard for me to do this. Not because there aren't opportunities fo…

[deleted]

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#143

Post by anentropic »

I think most of us here on this site could do the same in terms of learning and research

Seems to me the difficult part is how to support yourself financially while spending your time doing interesting learning and research, or how to get paid to do it

Maybe the most important detail in the story is "He co-founded a seed investment firm that focuses on education technology" but it is not discussed further

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#144

Post by pingyong »

itsmefaz wrote: post #139
pingyong wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those subjects require a different sort of motivation than a motivation Is that really the case? Apart from the obvious "maybe that's what they're intrinsically interested in" - if you start with a problem, try to solve it, and "pure mathematics" (whatever exactly that is supposed to be, anyway) is required to arrive at a solution, it becomes part of the intrinsic motivation. And if you keep solving problems without…

That's correct. If one is solving a problem and its requires learning of complex topics, then those topics become a part of the individual's intrinsic motivation. However, the problem with his idea is that learning always requires a goal and ones that do not have any have no intrinsic value. My argument here is that learning doesn't have be attached to any goal and the process of learning can purely be a stimulating…

>might not necessarily have any capitalistic value attached to it.

You seem to use goals and "capitalistic value" interchangeably, I would just like to add that projects in people's portfolios are often not initially created to make money, but simply to satisfy the creator's curiosity or because they thought it would be neat.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#145

Post by anjc »

exdsq wrote: post #132
itsmefaz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Submitting papers in conferences rather than journals.

Without submitting from a known university or research group? Seems unlikely to me. I have no doubt it can and has been done, but for it to be a regular thing such that one can recommend it in a 'Couch to 5k' style method? No way. I have some friends in Oxford who are DPhil/Postdocs in highly reputable research departments specializing in ML and if they sometimes struggle to get more than a poster session at the lead…

You're correct, I'm sure it could happen, it is highly unlikely that a non-academic could get published even at workshops for low ranking conferences. In my experience it takes at least a year of guidance before the average PhD can be accepted to any conferences without supervision. If OP can do this alone then he's exceptional.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#146

Post by itsmefaz »

pingyong wrote: post #144
itsmefaz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct. If one is solving a problem and its requires learning of complex topics, then those topics become a part of the individual's intrinsic motivation. However, the problem with his idea is that learning always requires a goal and ones that do not have any have no intrinsic value. My argument here is that learning doesn't have be attached to any goal and the process of learning can purely be a stimulating…

>might not necessarily have any capitalistic value attached to it. You seem to use goals and "capitalistic value" interchangeably, I would just like to add that projects in people's portfolios are often not initially created to make money, but simply to satisfy the creator's curiosity or because they thought it would be neat.

> I would just like to add that projects in people's portfolios are often not initially created to make money

We both can agree on this. But that's not how Emil looks at it, his entire point is that projects are better credentials than even degrees.

And since projects have higher value in portfolios, they will implicitly derive capital? One of the reasons why they have capitalistic value.

You and I can both agree, that projects and learning do have fun elements attached to them and might not necessarily be part of a larger goal. However, that's not what his views are!

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#147

Post by exdsq »

itsmefaz wrote: post #134
exdsq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without submitting from a known university or research group? Seems unlikely to me. I have no doubt it can and has been done, but for it to be a regular thing such that one can recommend it in a 'Couch to 5k' style method? No way. I have some friends in Oxford who are DPhil/Postdocs in highly reputable research departments specializing in ML and if they sometimes struggle to get more than a poster session at the lead…

The idea is to choose conferences like InfoQ where application type research is accepted. Like Build-X-using-TensorFlow, it doesn't have to align with standard research which requires formal education. One also needs to be skeptical while reading such a PR post and not get swayed away by the hero's journey in it.

I was not aware of InfoQ - that looks pretty cool actually. But yes, this makes a lot more sense. Thanks.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#148

Post by newswasboring »

rsp1984 wrote: post #137
newswasboring wrote: post #124

I'm not going to lie, his life story made me jealous. Extremely jealous. He did all the things I wanted to do (speaking in categories, not exact things) and is free to do more. It seems like in some cultures (mine is South Asian) there is a threshold on exploration time. Usually around the age of 28-30 years old (for some even lower than that, I consider myself one of the most fortunate ones). As I approach that numb…

I'm not going to lie, his life story was written and presented with the precise goal in mind to make people feel this way. I stopped reading after half the article because I found it way too self-promotional. So don't feel bad about your life just because someone on the internet pretends to have a more interesting one. Those people are usually just attention seekers and for some reason need the outside validation to…

I don't want to dismiss somebody else's life experience because it looks too fancy. I have nothing against honest self promotion, it's someone's story and I clicked on the article after reading the headline. I have no indication that this person is pretending or faking it. Also, even without all the quirky things, there are plenty of things to be jealous of. Like all the different things he tried his hands at, the freedom to just up and leave a pretty successful thing.

I realize that these articles suffer from the connecting the dots thing, where people make connection in the present which they would never have in the past. But that is besides my point, even if he failed at all those things, I am still jealous he had the chance to try all these things.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#149

Post by pingyong »

itsmefaz wrote: post #146
pingyong wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>might not necessarily have any capitalistic value attached to it. You seem to use goals and "capitalistic value" interchangeably, I would just like to add that projects in people's portfolios are often not initially created to make money, but simply to satisfy the creator's curiosity or because they thought it would be neat.

> I would just like to add that projects in people's portfolios are often not initially created to make money We both can agree on this. But that's not how Emil looks at it, his entire point is that projects are better credentials than even degrees. And since projects have higher value in portfolios, they will implicitly derive capital? One of the reasons why they have capitalistic value. You and I can both agree, th…

>However, that's not what his views are!

I'm not sure how you got to that conclusion. Certainly I don't see how

>projects are better credentials than even degrees.

would necessarily conflict with

>that projects and learning do have fun elements attached to them and might not necessarily be part of a larger goal.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#150

Post by jshowa3 »

randomdata wrote: post #112
ynx wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, as someone who had a partial education, I totally get the value of a degree, so whenever someone says "higher education is useless" I read it as "However successful I am now, I wasn't the kind of person who would succeed in school then"

Whenever I hear someone say "higher education is useless" I hear it in reference to the "common wisdom" that higher education increases incomes. In which case they are absolutely correct. Higher education is useless in achieving that. Incomes have held stagnant for many decades, even as more and more of the population attain higher levels of scholastic achievement. Mathematically, incomes cannot not remain stagnant i…

Statistically, higher education does increase incomes when factoring in multiple disciplines. The data is pretty clear on this.
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