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Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

thomwolf.io

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#11

Dumb question, but... Is AI and ML the same thing? I ask because I am seeing a lot of my ML peers claim to be AI experts with years of experience, even though the term AI wasn't really used at all until OpenAI got big.

Machine Learning is a newer term than AI. AI has been used for decades.

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#12
post #3

he probably felt the need to prescribe dense theoretical books given his position. prbably look like a fraud if he recommended ' grokking machine learning on manning.com'

Are you implying that he is adjusting his reading list to fake competence? Thomas Wolf has the second highest number of commits on HuggingFace/transformers. He is clearly competent & deeply technical

https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#14

Dumb question, but... Is AI and ML the same thing? I ask because I am seeing a lot of my ML peers claim to be AI experts with years of experience, even though the term AI wasn't really used at all until OpenAI got big.

What "AI" means has always been shifting; right now when most people hear it they assume it means generative AI and deep learning, but it's really a very broad category.

Early incarnations/uses of the term include what is now sometimes referred to as Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI), with such things as expert systems and ontological classification systems; these still technically fall under the umbrella of "AI". After GOFAI came other forms of technology, including the precursors to our current deep learning models, including much simpler and smaller neural networks. Again, these are still "AI", even if that's not what the public thinks when they hear the term.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#15
post #3

he probably felt the need to prescribe dense theoretical books given his position. prbably look like a fraud if he recommended ' grokking machine learning on manning.com'

This comment seems unnecessarily personal. The difference between the reading list and Grokking Machine Learning appears to be the layer of application.

‘Grokking’s description indicates it is for a very applied role: “teaches you how to apply ML to your projects using only standard Python code and high school-level math”.

The linked reading list appears to be targeted at one level up the stack so to speak. Instead of learning how to string a few Python libraries together (which is useful, not knocking it), the goal would possibly be writing the Python library itself for a ML architecture.

Given the author’s position, it makes sense why they found the content of the latter useful in getting to that position.

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#16
post #7

Dumb question, but... Is AI and ML the same thing? I ask because I am seeing a lot of my ML peers claim to be AI experts with years of experience, even though the term AI wasn't really used at all until OpenAI got big.

AI as a field has been around since the 50s and gone through multiple paradigms, but modern AI (since its resurgence around 2010) is effectively all machine learning.

Not really though.

Modern "publicly known and commercial" AI is effectively all machine learning

For a sample of non-ML AI that ML still has trouble solving, see papers published in:

https://ijcai-23.org/main-track-accepted-papers/

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#18
I have read all of them and I have watched almost all of the training videos mentioned and that, is the list I would give anybody who I would want to discourage from joining the field. The textbooks I mean COME ON. They are comprehensive and neatly academic but not pragmatic at all. There are playlists in youtube that would cut through all the unnecessary content and will get you building RAG systems in a couple of hours. Kudos to the Langchain team for all the content online.

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#19
post #18

I have read all of them and I have watched almost all of the training videos mentioned and that, is the list I would give anybody who I would want to discourage from joining the field. The textbooks I mean COME ON. They are comprehensive and neatly academic but not pragmatic at all. There are playlists in youtube that would cut through all the unnecessary content and will get you building RAG systems in a couple of h…

The fastest way to learn is always to go after a difficult problem you find fascinating. Learning by the books is the second fastest, and is suitable for those without the experience to have a fascinating problem to motivate them. This applies to many but not all, for example a university student might have a vague interest in AI but not know where to start. If you’re already in the field though, it’s best to just keep hacking forwards, even if you can’t prove every theorem from the major textbooks.

Re: Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

#20

I've always wondered if Hugging Face is meant to evoke the feeling of being attacked by a Facehugger.

It's meant to evoke the feeling of being in therapy. It started as an attempt to be an AI therapy company, and they pivoted to "github for AI" around 2019.
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