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This is the right question. There are relatively few people doing "Capital A Capital I" work building and training generative language/image models. Especially
by thatguymike 2y ago
This is the right question. There are relatively few people doing "Capital A Capital I" work building and training generative language/image models. Especially now that people have realized that calling the OpenAI API is going to work better than dedicating a team to tuning your own BERT model.
So some options are:
* Building ML models for traditional applications - forecasting, ranking, recommending, all of that. Data Scientists and ML Engineers haven't gone away.
* Working as an "AI Engineer" building on top of existing APIs and models. Very hip, but also in flux - I couldn't tell you whether that role will still be considered rare & valuable in a few years time, or what skills will be core to it.
* ML Ops, engineering work for building & serving AI & ML models. It's always good to be selling shovels.
I would try to get into a team you're interested in as a SWE and then upskill or pivot. In my experience this is more effective than trying to completely reskill and sell yourself as an unproven prospect for MLE or AI Scientist work. AI/ML teams still need software, and in fact many of the best researchers are not great software engineers.
- dontlikeyoueith 2y ago> Especially now that people have realized that calling the OpenAI API is going to work better than dedicating a team to tuning your own BERT model. At 100x the operating cost. If you have any kind of scale, using a model that's appropriately sized to your task is going to be better.
- dewey 2y ago> If you have any kind of scale I think that's the key also in terms of team size, if you don't have a dedicated team to take care of training / running a model then it makes sense to use an existing API and pay for it until you have enough scale.
- reaperman 2y agoGemma2 might be good enough for a drop-in option as well. The benefit for those who built on ChatGPT API is that as more open weight models get released, they can silently migrate their API usage to self-hosted models … ChatGPT allowed them to prove product-market fit early!
- dontlikeyoueith 2y agoThat is a fair point. Lots of times building the inefficient thing to prove market value is better than building the scalable thing that doesn't solve anyone's problems.