Letters
The Trouble With Reinforcement Learning
While working on Course 3 of the Machine Learning Specialization, which covers reinforcement learning, I was reflecting on how reinforcement learning algorithms are still quite finicky.
Letters
Letters
More Data for AI Developers: A New Law Makes it Easier to Scrape the Web
Many AI systems have been built using data scraped from the internet. Indeed, even the cornerstone dataset for computer vision research, ImageNet, was built using images taken from the public internet.
Letters
How to Build a Career in AI, Part 4: How to Sequence Projects to Build a Career
Last week’s letter focused on coming up with AI project ideas, part of a series on how to build a career in the field. This letter describes how a sequence of projects might fit into your career path.
Letters
How to Build a Career in AI, Part 3: Choosing Projects
In the last two letters, I wrote about developing a career in AI and shared tips for gaining technical skills. This time, I’d like to discuss an important step in building a career: project work.
Letters
How to Build a Career in AI, Part 2: Learning Technical Skills
Last week, I wrote about key steps for building a career in AI: learning technical skills, doing project work, and searching for a job, all of which is supported by being part of a community. In this letter, I’d like to dive more deeply into the first...
Letters
How to Build a Career in AI, Part 1: Three Steps to Career Growth
The rapid rise of AI has led to a rapid rise in AI jobs, and many people are building exciting careers in this field. A career is a decades-long journey, and the path is not always straightforward.
Letters
How to Keep the AI Community Growing
Many things in life have a positive side and a negative side. For instance, a new AI system might help democratize access, and at the same time it might be more accessible to people who have internet access than those who don’t.
Letters
Can an AI System Be Sentient? Ask a Philosopher
A Google Engineer recently announced he believes that a language model is sentient. I’m highly skeptical that any of today’s AI models are sentient. Some reporters, to their credit, also expressed skepticism.
Letters
What Rising Interest Rates Mean for AI, Part 2: Why It Still Makes Sense to Forge Ahead
Last week, I wrote about how rising interest rates are likely to lead investors and other finance professionals to focus on short-term returns rather than longer-term investments.
Letters
What Rising Interest Rates Mean for AI, Part 1: What's Likely to Happen
The United States Federal Reserve Bank has signaled that it will continue to raise interest rates. As one consequence, the stock market is significantly down, particularly tech stocks, relative to the beginning of the year.
Letters
A Solid Foundation for a Rewarding Career
Years ago, I had to choose between a neural network and a decision tree learning algorithm. It was necessary to pick an efficient one, because we planned to apply the algorithm to a very large set of users on a limited compute budget.
Letters
How to Build AI Startups Part 3: Set Customer Expectations!
One of the challenges of building an AI startup is setting customer expectations. Machine learning is a highly experiment-driven field. Until you’ve built something, it’s hard to predict how well it will work.