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But the problem here is: you need to pay for software development. This requires a few years of effort by a capable machine learning engineer that's also a pret
by spwa4 2y ago
But the problem here is: you need to pay for software development. This requires a few years of effort by a capable machine learning engineer that's also a pretty good software developer. I would love to try this, mostly to become a capable machine learning engineer. But ... what's missing is the $, like in so many software demands.
I looked up the paper on this, but there are no good models for it that generate proper syntax. So for one thing, whoever does this would need to grind out creating at minimum a few 10,000 math exercises, to get the software to work.
So this costs, say, ~400.000 USD, and 2 years of time, counting taxes, equipment, office, ... Perhaps "only" 100.000 if you're a professor and willing to use a PhD student (and deal with the issues that will give).
Now I don't mean to disparage this proposal. But this seems to be how everything works except "improve our existing boring software 1%" ... And it's frustrating. At best, I can find machine learning jobs that boil down to "make LLMs solve tickets" or, worse "make LLMs write spam" (usually customize/personalize existing spam mails). Beats solving tickets myself, that it definitely does, but something like this ...
I don't have trouble finding software development jobs. However, I cannot ever seem to do something like this. I would so love to make something like this, to really take a hard problem, work it and make something beautiful. But this is not a hobby effort. This requires spending a few years of effort making something beautiful.
If this is done as a hobby project I can make a nice tech demo, no doubt, but it will be only what I make of it, and it'll be a limited cool tech demo, just like what Apple did (making a gradio that does a few examples correctly isn't very hard), what I'd use it for. Not because I don't want to make the next generation of advanced calculators, but because I'd never have the time to do that.
- mlajtos 2y agoYou are not wrong. In 2021, I did bootstrap everything on my own – dataset, segmentation algorithm, neural net, UI, math engine, etc. And in the end, it worked properly only for me. But that was my aim – own complete stack to be able to try out everything that might be interesting without being burdened by 3rd party solutions. It was a prototype that I could show to people – spread the idea. Doing product of that magnitude on my own would never fly. I don't think Apple did a "cool tech demo". In my view, they published first version of a very ambitious project. They worked on it for years with top talent. And they felt this is the minimum lovable product on which they will iterate. And if you would like to build product-ready solution similar to Math Notes, you can leverage existing stuff. MyScript.com have really good handwriting recognition system with bells and whistles. You can take a lot of shortcuts.
- spwa4 2y agoWell, I hope you'll open source it. But I will 100% understand you not doing this. And it's just a general observation. Being well paid to make a technically impressive GOOD product for people, I would so love to be in that situation. But barring a FANG job, I don't know what to do.