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Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

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Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#101

Post by uoaei »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #36
tenache wrote: post #29

Although I studied machine learning and was originally hired for that role, the company pivoted and is now working with LLMs, so I spend most of my day working on figuring out how different LLMs work, what parameters work best for them, how to do RAG, how to integrate them with other bots.

Would you not consider LLMs as a part of machine learning?

There is a vanishingly small percentage of people actually working on the design and training of LLMs vs all those who call themselves "AI engineers" who are just hitting APIs.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#102

Post by uoaei »

redwood wrote: post #57

Do people feel like they are more or less in demand with the hyper around genai?

Demand is higher for flashy things that look good on directors' desks, definitely. But there's less attention on less flashy applications of machine learning, unless your superiors are so clueless that they think what you're doing is GenAI. Which sometimes the systems/models being trained are legitimately generative, but in the more technical, traditional sense.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#103

Post by primaprashant »

Been working as an MLE for the last 5 years and as another comment said most of the work is close to SWE. Depending on the stage of the project I'm working on, day-to-day work varies but it's along the lines of one of these:

- Collaboration with stakeholders & TPMs and analyzing data to develop hypotheses to solve business problems with high priority

- Framing business problems as ML problems and creating suitable metrics for ML models and business problems

- Building PoCs and prototypes to validate the technical feasibility of the new features and ideas

- Creating design docs for architecture and technical decisions

- Collaborating with the platform teams to set up and maintain the data pipelines based on the needs of new and exiting ML projects

- Building, deploying, and maintaining ML microservices for inference

- Writing design docs for running A/B tests and performing post-test analyses

- Setting up pipelines for retraining of ML models

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#104

Post by makapuf »

avmich wrote: post #10
makapuf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe pip should not work by default (but python -m venv then pip install should)

Legends say there were times when you'd have a program.c file and just run cc program.c, and then could just execute the compiled result. Funny that programmer's job is highly automatable, yet we invent ourselves tons of intermediate layers which we absolutely have to deal with manually.

I agree simplicity is king. But you're comparing making a script using dependencies and tooling for those dependencies and a C program with no dependencies. You can download a simple python script and run it directly if it has no dependencies besides stdlib (which is way larger in python). That's why I love using bottle.py by example.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#106

Post by 0x008 »

davedx wrote: post #5

pip install pytorch Environment broken Spend 4 hours fixing python environment pip install Pillow Something something incorrect cpu architecture for your Macbook Spend another 4 hours reinstalling everything from scratch after nuking every single mention of python pip install … oh time to go home!

I can recommend to try poetry. It is a lot more succesful in resolving dependencies than pip.

Although I think the UX of poetry is stupid and I do not agree with some design decisions, I have not had any dependency conflicts since I used it.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#107

Post by globular-toast »

davedx wrote: post #5

pip install pytorch Environment broken Spend 4 hours fixing python environment pip install Pillow Something something incorrect cpu architecture for your Macbook Spend another 4 hours reinstalling everything from scratch after nuking every single mention of python pip install … oh time to go home!

You could learn how to use Python. Just spend one of those 4 hours actually learning. Imagine just getting into a car and pressing controls until something happened. This wouldn't be allowed to happen in any other industry.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#108

Post by sirlunchalot »

globular-toast wrote: post #107
davedx wrote: post #5

pip install pytorch Environment broken Spend 4 hours fixing python environment pip install Pillow Something something incorrect cpu architecture for your Macbook Spend another 4 hours reinstalling everything from scratch after nuking every single mention of python pip install … oh time to go home!

You could learn how to use Python. Just spend one of those 4 hours actually learning. Imagine just getting into a car and pressing controls until something happened. This wouldn't be allowed to happen in any other industry.

Could you be a bit more specific about what you mean by "You could learn how to use python"? What resources would you recommend to learn how to work around problems the OP has? What basic procedures/resources can you recommend to "learn python"? I work as a software developer alongside my studies and often face the same problems as OP that I would like to avoid. Very grateful for any tips!

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#109

Post by roughly »

bick_nyers wrote: post #80
saulrh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HIPAA my left foot. That was my experience as well - training documentation for fresh college grads (i.e. me) directed new engineers to just... send SQL queries to production to learn. There was a process for gaining permissions, there were audit logs, but the only sign-off you needed was your manager, permission lasted 12 months, and the managers just rubber-stamped everyone. That was ten years ago. Every time I t…

... you didn't have a UAT environment?

There’s an old joke that everyone’s got a testing environment, but some people are lucky enough to have a separate production environment.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#110

Post by m_ke »

burnedout_dc4e3 wrote: post #52

I've been doing machine learning since the mid 2000s. About half of my time is spent keeping data pipelines running to get data into shape for training and using in models. The other half is spent doing tech support for the bunch of recently hired "AI scientists" who can barely code, and who spend their days copy/pasting stuff into various chatbot services. Stuff like telling them how to install python packages and u…

I just quit a day ago with nothing lined up for the same reason.
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