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This article isn't about becoming an AI expert. It's about learning enough AI to be able to build applications that help the world. Having taken Fast.ai's Deep

This article isn't about becoming an AI expert. It's about learning enough AI to be able to build applications that help the world. Having taken Fast.ai's Deep Learning course, I can confidently say that their course is enough to help a software engineer with no previous AI experience build extremely powerful real-world AI applications. Jeremy Howard (the cofounder of Fast.ai, the former president of Kaggle, and the former #1 Kaggle competitor) only has a B.A. in Philosophy. One student who started the Fast.ai course as a violinist is now working as a researcher at Google Brain. It may have been true in the past that you need many years of work to become competent at building AI, but that's not true anymore.

usgroup 8y ago
I think there’s a difference between mechanical sympathy and really knowing what’s going on mathematically. IMO, parent is right. It’s going the way computing did. Ie most degree programmes basically teach you how to programme. Many degrees don’t even require maths anymore. Hype drives demand drives hiring ,... and always at the top a bunch of guys that don’t know anything about ML at all :)
- collyw 8y ago
  Yes, but couldn't the same be said about many aspects of software engineering. If you want to optimize a database query of some application code, yes you need to understand what's going on under the hood, but to produce something useful you only need a fraction of that knowledge.
  - usgroup 8y ago
    Yes that quite right IMO. Software has been a craft for ages. And I don’t mean it disparagingly, but the number of devs that can think from first principles, know the difference between computing and programming or get “close to the metal”, is relatively small. I think the same is true of marketing. The number of marketers that are also good researchers is tiny. And so on. The common denominator is short supply, high demand pressure, and in all I’m thankful for it because it keeps the wolf from the door for many of us. But.. it leaves the deeper science/art (whatever yours be) untapped , and it adds so much noise to the market that gold becomes difficult to sell for peanuts.
    - collyw 8y ago
      Software seems to encourage shallow knowledge these days, with a constant churn of new frameworks / databases or whatever the latest trend is.

usgroup 8y ago

I think there’s a difference between mechanical sympathy and really knowing what’s going on mathematically. IMO, parent is right. It’s going the way computing did. Ie most degree programmes basically teach you how to programme. Many degrees don’t even require maths anymore. Hype drives demand drives hiring ,... and always at the top a bunch of guys that don’t know anything about ML at all :)

collyw 8y ago
Yes, but couldn't the same be said about many aspects of software engineering. If you want to optimize a database query of some application code, yes you need to understand what's going on under the hood, but to produce something useful you only need a fraction of that knowledge.
- usgroup 8y ago
  Yes that quite right IMO. Software has been a craft for ages. And I don’t mean it disparagingly, but the number of devs that can think from first principles, know the difference between computing and programming or get “close to the metal”, is relatively small. I think the same is true of marketing. The number of marketers that are also good researchers is tiny. And so on. The common denominator is short supply, high demand pressure, and in all I’m thankful for it because it keeps the wolf from the door for many of us. But.. it leaves the deeper science/art (whatever yours be) untapped , and it adds so much noise to the market that gold becomes difficult to sell for peanuts.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Software seems to encourage shallow knowledge these days, with a constant churn of new frameworks / databases or whatever the latest trend is.