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In my experience people who make dismissive comments about AI (in its current form) and AI Engineering as a discipline tend to have very little experience with

In my experience people who make dismissive comments about AI (in its current form) and AI Engineering as a discipline tend to have very little experience with and superficial understanding of AI. Once you start using it seriously as part of your engineering stack it quickly becomes clear that there’s a lot of detail and complexity that more than justify specialisation.

z3c0 3y ago
Heavily disagree, and this just seems like posturing from the other side of things. I understand AI rather heavily, and have been a part of the scene far before the explosion of even the first GPT model. Frankly, I've been quite irked by all the people who claim themselves "ML engineer" when most of what they do is glue huggingface models together. They're doing none of the work required to make models, which is quite extensive. They understand very little about the models they wield. This new wave, I find even more irksome. "Prompt engineer" and "AI engineer" and aren't much more than pseudoscientists who fanangle API inputs until they get what they want. This is in stark contrast to all the maths I perform to understand a model's performance.
- intellectronica 3y ago
  I think you've just proven my point.
  - z3c0 3y ago
    On reddit, this might seem like a burn, but here, you need to explain that claim and not just hope somebody rides with it. How is tinkering with an API an actual understanding of AI? Please actually explain
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Strong agreement. What we have right now is a lot of people doing light glue code and pretending it is engineering.
  - __loam 3y ago
    They're building slapdash, code by night bullshit apps that barely fucking work and calling it engineering. When I see those "AI landscape" images with logos from 200 different companies, I know we're in a bubble. A lot of these guys are going to take VC money then crash and burn when someone else builds a marginally better version of their GPT api wrapper. The real winners will be companies like Nvidia cashing in on this hype cycle.

z3c0 3y ago

Heavily disagree, and this just seems like posturing from the other side of things. I understand AI rather heavily, and have been a part of the scene far before the explosion of even the first GPT model. Frankly, I've been quite irked by all the people who claim themselves "ML engineer" when most of what they do is glue huggingface models together. They're doing none of the work required to make models, which is quite extensive. They understand very little about the models they wield. This new wave, I find even more irksome. "Prompt engineer" and "AI engineer" and aren't much more than pseudoscientists who fanangle API inputs until they get what they want. This is in stark contrast to all the maths I perform to understand a model's performance.

intellectronica 3y ago
I think you've just proven my point.
- z3c0 3y ago
  On reddit, this might seem like a burn, but here, you need to explain that claim and not just hope somebody rides with it. How is tinkering with an API an actual understanding of AI? Please actually explain
foobiekr 3y ago
Strong agreement. What we have right now is a lot of people doing light glue code and pretending it is engineering.
- __loam 3y ago
  They're building slapdash, code by night bullshit apps that barely fucking work and calling it engineering. When I see those "AI landscape" images with logos from 200 different companies, I know we're in a bubble. A lot of these guys are going to take VC money then crash and burn when someone else builds a marginally better version of their GPT api wrapper. The real winners will be companies like Nvidia cashing in on this hype cycle.