11–20 of 105 posts
> While I’m interested in machine learning, I’m not convinced that today’s AI is anywhere near as profound as electricity or fire This seems a not too uncommon experience among CS people where machine learning loses its interest once they understand the magic
@akshayka can you elaborate a bit more on why you think that
Incredible post and very useful!
> While I’m interested in machine learning, I’m not convinced that today’s AI is anywhere near as profound as electricity or fire This seems a not too uncommon experience among CS people where machine learning loses its interest once they understand the magic
But I would not say that makes it uninteresting. Nor does it make it irrelevant from a business perspective. There are still lots of beneficial ways to use ML, and lots of different angles from which to derive intellectual satisfaction. I suppose if someone went into the field expecting I Robot type stuff, they might be disappointed, but it's hard to imagine someone with a CS background having such unrealistic expectations of what ML actually is.
Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…
I'm now in my third year of my PhD and enjoying it more than ever, so there's that at least! In all seriousness, I totally acknowledge that the variance in satisfaction with a PhD is very large. I'm lucky to have a great advisor and incredible labmates; my happiness with the program is largely due to them.
This. So much this. As in just about every profession, people make or break places. Your advisor and lab mates are everything... choose wisely, and choose them vs a school for its name.
Sounds like some folks didn't like writing! :)
> I’m not convinced that today’s AI is anywhere near as profound as electricity or fire @akshayka can you elaborate a bit more on why you think that
> While I’m interested in machine learning, I’m not convinced that today’s AI is anywhere near as profound as electricity or fire This seems a not too uncommon experience among CS people where machine learning loses its interest once they understand the magic
Maybe. I went into my program with no preconceived ideas that there was 'magic' happening here. What I got out of it was a real curiosity about how humans think and how that may not be a magical as we think either.
Long-term I cannot see AI being anything but the paradigm-smashing artifact it's sold as. But progress is (relatively) slow on a human scale, so we find incremental progress ultimately lackluster.
If you take it through that lens it becomes more reasonable and you find yourself less skeptical that, just as we have no flying cars, we have no AGI or that all work has been replaced.
Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…
Woof.