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Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder

thomwolf.io

21–29 of 29 posts

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

#21

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.

In my experience they mean basically the same thing in practice most of the time. The industry used AI for a long time (up through the 2000s iirc) but it developed a bit of a reputation for going nowhere. Then there was a revival in the 2010s "The Social Network" funding environment when "machine learning" was preferred, I think to shake off some of the dust associated with the old name. Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back to "AI", driven by several high profile and well funded though leaders who have rewarmed the old AGI narrative thanks to some major leaps forward in models for certain applications.

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

#22

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.

This is the venn diagram I keep seeing when this question is asked: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363930739/figure/fi... GenAI ⊆ Deep Learning ⊆ Machine Learning ⊆ AI, where ⊆ means "Is a subset of."

Also, originally I think Machine Learning was more related to the field of Statistics than other AI methods that were more traditional CS.

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

#24
Thanks for the list.

Interesting to see that the book by the late David MacKay made it to the list, it is available to download in several formats from the book's website.

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms:

https://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/

The lectures based on the book by David MacKay himself:

https://youtu.be/BCiZc0n6COY

Probably it's not a surprise that the father of information theory Claude Shannon is the earliest one to propose stochastic LLM based on Markov chain.

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

#25
Bengio & Goodfellows book, while a great reference, is certainly not what I'd recommend for beginners. It's great for experienced folks IMHO, but otherwise it's quite opaque. I've used it to teach in the past and beginners really struggled with it.

Still an amazing reference though!

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

#26

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.

Ok, I hear a lot of 'AI is a superset of ML' definitions, and yes, that's historically true, but today AI is shorthand for LLM's and others (image generation, embedding, DL-based time series). I'd draw the line at systems using emergent phenomena that aren't realistically reducible to understandable rules.

Should we say 'this uses AI' for a Prolog/expert system/A*/symbolic reasoning/planning/optimization system today? Idunno; I had scruples even about calling classical and Bayesian statistical models 'machine learning,' reserving that for models prioritizing computational properties over probabilistic interpretation.

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

#27
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…

Feel free to post those playlists for those discouraged by the list of academic resources :)

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

#28
post #10

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.

If we want to be precise (and it seems like you do): AI = machines doing human-like tasks. ML = machines learning to do stuff. Doing financial modeling or code-base security auditing 100x better than a person is good ML and not AI at all.

Eh, a lot of it’s more down to marketing. ‘AI’ as a term has periodically come in and out of fashion; for instance, is OCR AI? Well, not 20 years ago, certainly, the term being unfashionable at the time, but now: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/computer...

(Computer vision, in particular, is basically always classified as AI today, but the term was mostly avoided in the industry until quite recently.)

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

#29
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…

Feel free to post those playlists for those discouraged by the list of academic resources :)

I second this!
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