Andrew Ng Says ‘AI Has An Instagram Problem’
In the latest release of ‘Letters by Andrew Ng,’ the founder of DeepLearning.AI stated that AI has an Instagram problem. “I’m here to say: Judge your projects according to your standard, and don’t let the shiny objects make you doubt the worth of your work!” he declared. The persuasive issue known as the shiny object syndrome is common in the tech industry as developers are easily distracted by novel technologies, tools, or trends. Ng has addressed the issue of people doubting the worth of their work and instead judging their projects based on the perfect standards set by the media. He wrote, ‘Just as pictures of people’s perfect lives in the media aren’t representative, pictures of AI developers’ postings of their amazing projects also aren’t representative.’ He continues narrating his personal experience from a few years ago when reinforcement learning (RL) made progress on Atari games, Alpha Go was in the headlines, and RL videos using OpenAI Gym circulated on social media. Ng was still focused on supervised learning even though he wondered if he was missing out. AI is making waves with new ideas like ‘quantum AI, self-supervised learning, transformers, diffusion models, large language models, and on and on.’ While some have been impactful others have not. Nonetheless, the field evolves. Ng thinks large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT (and, to a significant but lesser extent, diffusion models, best known for generating images) will have a transformative impact on AI, but they are far from the only things that will be important. Paying attention to developments in AI can help stay on top of the field and also become an inspiration. Ng writes, ‘Being inspired by Instagram is fine, but changing your life because of FOMO is less helpful.’ Ng concluded the letter thought-provokingly and wrote, ‘think about how all the LLM researchers must have felt a few years ago when everyone was buzzing about RL’. But Ng is not the only one preaching—and practising—this. Self-supervised learning guru Yann LeCun has been proclaiming the same for a while now. With the amount of attention ChatGPT is receiving on the internet, LeCun had said in an AIM interview that he does not think those systems in their current forms work in ways that we expect. The data systems are entertaining but they’re not very useful. To make it useful, one has to make them solve real problems for people, he explained.
Don’t let media buzz overshadow your work he advises.
In the latest release of ‘Letters by Andrew Ng,’ the founder of DeepLearning.AI stated that AI has an Instagram problem. “I’m here to say: Judge your projects according to your standard, and don’t let the shiny objects make you doubt the worth of your work!” he declared. The persuasive issue known as the shiny object syndrome is common in the tech industry.
["Andrew Ng", "andrew ng ai"]
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["AI", "ChatGPT", "OpenAI", "Aim", "Transformers", "R", "Go", "ELT", "GPT", "diffusion models"]
Tasmia is a tech journalist at AIM, looking to bring a fresh perspective to emerging technologies and trends in data science, analytics, and artificial intelligence.