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For the people saying that incomplete knowledge of theoretical foundations will lead to dangerous or "bad" AI - go read some papers from respected academics and

For the people saying that incomplete knowledge of theoretical foundations will lead to dangerous or "bad" AI - go read some papers from respected academics and 'industry leaders'. Incomplete knowledge is something we have to deal with one way or the other. For the people saying that people won't be able to do anything useful after a 7 week course, go look at what beginner programmers are creating these days. There are so many resources out there now. I am constantly surprised at the impressive and practically valuable scripts that programmers are writing after a several week course. I was excited to get a hangman game working weeks after first learning to code - but now it's not uncommon to build multi-player games or complicated, good looking web apps with less experience. We've definitely moved a level of abstraction higher in the last decade - it just wasn't as clear cut as MIPS to Java. I think the highest value created here might be in the really non-sexy "oh so that's what 'AI' means" revelations that more and more people are having every day. Before I spent two years studying ML I had the same crazy ideas around AGI that many people with no understanding have. And I got super lost in the same non-productive discussions about what AI might do, what it could currently do, and what it all actually meant. If courses like fast.ai can get a critical mass of people to understand core ML concepts like classification and overfitting and accuracy and precision and recall I think we'd collectively get closer to stopping the hype train and focusing attention on where advancement is actually possible and currently happening. I know dozens of people taking this course, from all walks of life, and I am convinced that they're all gaining useful knowledge, and are likely to benefit society in some way as well. Maybe they're not going to invent GANs from scratch, but neither is every one who learned what an if statement is going to turn into Linus. Gate keeping isn't cool. This course is (though it actively claims that it isn't).

joe_the_user 8y ago
For the people saying that incomplete knowledge of theoretical foundations will lead to dangerous or "bad" AI - go read some papers from respected academics and 'industry leaders'. It's not models that would necessarily be bad when made by something like "script-machine-learners". What has a lot of potential for a lot of badness is taking these models as given by "magic". Machine learning is essentially a giant exercise in piecing-together correlations by sort-of clever, sort-of brute-force methods. What's hard is knowing the proper application areas and the improper application areas.

joe_the_user 8y ago

For the people saying that incomplete knowledge of theoretical foundations will lead to dangerous or "bad" AI - go read some papers from respected academics and 'industry leaders'. It's not models that would necessarily be bad when made by something like "script-machine-learners". What has a lot of potential for a lot of badness is taking these models as given by "magic". Machine learning is essentially a giant exercise in piecing-together correlations by sort-of clever, sort-of brute-force methods. What's hard is knowing the proper application areas and the improper application areas.