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If you are a "leader" trying to hire a "skilled" AI worker, you are probably an idiot. It's literally a brand new field! - you are choosing the most limp-wriste

If you are a "leader" trying to hire a "skilled" AI worker, you are probably an idiot. It's literally a brand new field! - you are choosing the most limp-wristed, back-seat response possible. The only skill you are going to hire for is the ability to lie on a resume. Unfortunately, I think this myopia extends to the entire breadth of the "skills gap". Any executive complaining is kind of admitting they lack the skills to actually manage humans. What actual leaders are doing is the same thing they have always done - hire smart, enthusiastic people and give them the resources they need. The whole point is to recognize potential talent - not just reading the tag and slotting them into thankless positions then complaining when they don't fit. But this requires trust, and flexibility, trial and error, and actual knowledge. And certainly no executive would want themselves treated in such a way. But this kind of leadership is hard and requires admitting failure occasionally - so for some reason spending 3 months cross-training a programmer to be an IT Operations specialist is seen as inferior to waiting 9 months to overpay someone new.

WalterSear 2y ago
If you are a "leader" trying to hire a "skilled" AI worker you are probably trying just trying to buy the ability to say "AI" a lot in your press releases. Save your money, just say "AI" a lot, you'll be better off than your competitors - trying to shoehorn The New Clippy™ into every corner of their app. To wit: > It showed that 40% of 2,000 C-level executives surveyed plan to use genAI tools such as ChatGPT to cover critical skills shortages through the automation of tasks. And even if you find a skilled AI worker, they'll just try to convince you not to build a chatbot. So much golf time wasted! > “If there’s a desire to delegate critical activities and functions to genAI, it is essential that senior management first develops a deeper understanding of the data management processes, including what data can and cannot be used to train these systems,” said David Emm, Kaspersky’s principal security researcher. This reminds me of every tech craze before it. I remember when executives thought they could just 'buy' a website and be done with it all that bother. So we got stuck with shitty online banking for most of a decade.
SillyUsername 2y ago
AI is most certainly not a new field. NN are decades old, it's only modern LLM transformer tech that is new. Perhaps look at a primer on NN feed forward, RNN and transformer evolution. There's also GOFAI, genetic algorithms, pattern matching algorithms (image recognition is a subset of NN), rules based algorithms (e.g. Bayesian) and others. As a tech lead dev, I hire ML specialists and most can't even tell me what GPT stands for in ChatGPT, but some actually have a the full background I mention above, and there's very few of these, even less of those understand the mathematics, but just how to use Langchain or AWS services. So it's true there is a skills shortage, but it's heavily polluted by people jumping on the AI bandwagon to try and get a lucrative/high paying job, and this is probably what you are seeing.
- noobermin 2y ago
  Read the article, they're not hiring for "AI" as you think of it, literally "Gen AI" is listed as a skill they want to hire for. You're potentially misreading the room here, the types complaining here are the type of executive described in this tweet: https://x.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1794479938101280886 https://x.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1794479938101280886
- iknownthing 2y ago
  The sad part is for most of these jobs you actually do only need to know how to use Langchain or AWS services (ok maybe not langchain). The mathematics part is generally just for the interviews.

WalterSear 2y ago

If you are a "leader" trying to hire a "skilled" AI worker you are probably trying just trying to buy the ability to say "AI" a lot in your press releases. Save your money, just say "AI" a lot, you'll be better off than your competitors - trying to shoehorn The New Clippy™ into every corner of their app. To wit: > It showed that 40% of 2,000 C-level executives surveyed plan to use genAI tools such as ChatGPT to cover critical skills shortages through the automation of tasks. And even if you find a skilled AI worker, they'll just try to convince you not to build a chatbot. So much golf time wasted! > “If there’s a desire to delegate critical activities and functions to genAI, it is essential that senior management first develops a deeper understanding of the data management processes, including what data can and cannot be used to train these systems,” said David Emm, Kaspersky’s principal security researcher. This reminds me of every tech craze before it. I remember when executives thought they could just 'buy' a website and be done with it all that bother. So we got stuck with shitty online banking for most of a decade.

SillyUsername 2y ago

AI is most certainly not a new field. NN are decades old, it's only modern LLM transformer tech that is new. Perhaps look at a primer on NN feed forward, RNN and transformer evolution. There's also GOFAI, genetic algorithms, pattern matching algorithms (image recognition is a subset of NN), rules based algorithms (e.g. Bayesian) and others. As a tech lead dev, I hire ML specialists and most can't even tell me what GPT stands for in ChatGPT, but some actually have a the full background I mention above, and there's very few of these, even less of those understand the mathematics, but just how to use Langchain or AWS services. So it's true there is a skills shortage, but it's heavily polluted by people jumping on the AI bandwagon to try and get a lucrative/high paying job, and this is probably what you are seeing.

noobermin 2y ago
Read the article, they're not hiring for "AI" as you think of it, literally "Gen AI" is listed as a skill they want to hire for. You're potentially misreading the room here, the types complaining here are the type of executive described in this tweet: https://x.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1794479938101280886 https://x.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1794479938101280886
iknownthing 2y ago
The sad part is for most of these jobs you actually do only need to know how to use Langchain or AWS services (ok maybe not langchain). The mathematics part is generally just for the interviews.