[HN Gopher] Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent thems...
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Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI
experts
Author : dacohenii
Score : 23 points
Date : 2023-06-28 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| tommasoamici wrote:
| It's not just tech workers, it's also tech projects.
|
| Compare how minio has advertised itself through the years:
|
| 2023: High Performance Object Storage for AI [0]
|
| 2022: High Performance, Kubernetes Native Object Storage [1]
|
| 2020: MinIO is a high performance object storage server
| compatible with Amazon S3 APIs [2]
|
| I get that buzzwords and marketing are important, but it rubs me
| the wrong way
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230628165639/https://github.co...
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220204012915/https://github.co...
| [2]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200528195457/https://github.co...
| realitythreek wrote:
| "S3 clone" is easier to remember though.
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| literally who?
| captainbland wrote:
| A UK perspective on this is that the AI trend, as described in
| the article, would quickly turn into a class divide. Many
| employers in AI/ML spaces seem to want postgraduate degrees.
| Often the academic entry requirements to such degrees aren't that
| high (usually a bachelors degree with an "ok" mark like a 2:2 or
| a 2:1 min in a related subject - not exactly sky high attainment
| criteria) but the financial barriers are relatively severe - far
| poorer finance options are available as compared to undergraduate
| degrees especially.
|
| The dynamic then seems to be that while software development has
| been functioning as a relatively effective source of social
| mobility, if you can do the work you can create a decent career,
| the current AI wave threatens to pull up the ladder for many if
| this trend carries on as described.
|
| That said I'm not too worried about it playing out like that yet,
| at least not in the medium term. I think industry is at some
| pinnacle of optimism around AI but don't quite realise that it's
| not a great fit for a lot of commercially relevant use cases like
| maintenance of existing code bases of more than trivial
| complexity and it's unlikely to be for a good while and where
| there is sensitivity to copyright. I think once that reality sets
| in there will be some degree of back-peddling.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| > the financial barriers are relatively severe
|
| Anyone taking out loans for a PhD in the UK is a fool. Not only
| are our PhDs generally less well regarded than those from the
| EU and US, but there is also an abundance of grant funding
| available. If you can't get paid as part of a grant (and hence
| have fees taken care of) for a PhD here, then either the field
| of study has little economic value, or you are not considered
| good enough.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I don't see it quite like that. It may be true that many
| employers are looking for postgrads. I don't know. But since
| practically _every single company_ large or small wants to know
| how or if they can take advantage of AI right now, there are
| plenty of opportunities to go around for anyone who has any
| knowledge or skills in generative AI.
|
| And by far the most deployed technologies, even for postdocs,
| are going to be basically off-the-shelf or somewhat fine-tuned
| existing models via API or tooling being used for text and/or
| image generation for specific applications. In other words,
| things that in no way require the degree. That isn't to say
| that having real machine learning specialists isn't desirable,
| but there is plenty of room for people who just know how to
| apply the tools rather than invent new ones.
|
| Actually there are plenty of "academic" papers coming out from
| people with advanced degrees that are mainly just applying
| GPT-4 to write code in some DSL to solve some category of
| problem. That stuff doesn't even require basic understanding of
| neural network architectures.
|
| The latest models are so powerful it seems to be having a
| democratizing effect rather than increasing the class divide.
| From my perspective.
| slavapestov wrote:
| If you can rebrand yourself as an "expert" in some shiny new
| thing by spending a few weeks at a boot camp, there probably
| isn't much there and you will be competing for the same jobs
| against countless others who did the same.
|
| I managed to completely ignore the cool new thing for the last 20
| years and instead slowly built up knowledge in those problem
| domains that actually interest me, and it's worked out alright.
| routerl wrote:
| You assume that "branding yourself as an expert" is the same as
| "becoming an expert".
| JohnFen wrote:
| My read of his comment is the opposite of that.
| realitythreek wrote:
| Yeah what most companies are even thinking about right now is
| prompt engineering which doesn't require an advanced degree.
|
| Actually developing models is a much smaller field (in terms of
| jobs) and the overlap with software engineering is small. I'm
| sure you can make a lot of money in it, but you're better off
| coming at it from data science.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Agreed. Of the many things I've learned over the years, two
| related ones are:
|
| if the work you're doing is work that you're genuinely
| interested in, you have a _huge_ immediate advantage, and
|
| Running into where crowd is running out, and running out of
| where the crowd is running in usually (but not always) gives
| you a large advantage.
| dacohenii wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear about the experiences of someone who
| has gone through that Berkeley program or a similar one.
| riku_iki wrote:
| half of them likely were crypto experts year ago.
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