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Ask HN: How important is learning AI/ML now?

3 points by Madmallard ↗ HN
It seems like ChatGPT is rapidly taking over the world and similar programs are sure to follow suit. The ability for it to generate usable code on prompting as well as tailor it to your specifications seems like a mandatory skill for programmers. But if that were to start upending jobs, it seems like understanding the nitty gritty behind its implementation would be necessary to stay competitive.

However, I was talking with my brother about machine learning since he has been learning and playing with it for a while now, and he said the most important thing isn't the algorithms themselves, but the data they use to train the models. He said the data has to be really well-curated and selected, or the training will end up being basically useless.

So is it more important then to become competent at all aspects of data science? I want to not be rendered replaceable due to the AI/ML technology job takeover. Currently I have little experience with either, but I do have about 10 years experience in software development in general.

6 comments

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gsatic
In pure software terms it's quite boring. Worked on speech rec. Most of the time you are just making tools for a giant army to manually clean up/handle better all the edge cases. Game Dev is much more interesting these days.
Madmallard
Do you think GPT-related code generation and things like stable diffusion will massively speed up the production of indie games and flood the markets in the coming years?
gsatic
You can build games fast today. There is no lack of tools or ppl with skills.

In fact when Wall St asked Disney's Bob Iger if their marvel movies were raking it in, why not produce more of them every year. And he said that they had the resources and established pipeline to pump out blockbuster level movies every week. But there werent enough ppl on the planet with cash to buy those tickets. So looks like we are already hitting the upper bounds of what the market can consume, given the rate at which we can produce content and given the tools we already have.

Madmallard
Dang I need to learn the techniques to rapidly putting these out I get stuck on things like DB managemen, accounts, security, and netcode
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PaulHoule
Your brother has it right.

It is very hard to make a language model as good as OpenAI but it is not hard to download a model from huggingface and fine-tune it to solve a particular problem.

My favorite kind of ML paper is when someone applies several common models to a random problem they cared about, as opposed to papers where the best in the world compete on problems that have been done to death. I will not get best in the world results but the run of the mill papers help me understand the results that I can get on my own run of the mill problems.