Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML is so horrifically misguided I hardly know where to even begin debunking it.
PhDs are one especially crappy way to prove you have the intellectual chops to engage with ML. There are far more direct, practical, and expedient alternative paths to get there.
Importantly, the number of people who were perfectly capable of doing a PhD but chose not to (because, frankly, it's a very bad deal) vastly dwarfs the number of people who stuck around in academia and obtained one. Additionally, my observation at several major tech companies is that PhDs have a bent of mind that is roughly orthogonal to the pursuit of real business value.
Yikes! This doesn't really come across as a nice comment (bent minds???). There are good concrete reasons to pursue a PhD (ignoring soft reasons like pure interest): wanting a research career is one - it's pretty difficult to get hired as a scientist without a PhD. Also, historical evidence doesn't really support your claim that R&D is orthogonal to business value. Sure, pure science is often independent from $$$ (despite plenty of examples of producing real value), but applied R&D is oftentimes parallel to value generation. if R&D in general is useless, why do top tech companies spend big money on research groups?
Getting a PhD is a fine deal if you have good reasons.
I explicitly caveated my statement with "Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML" for a reason. The vast majority of people going into applied ML are not pioneering new methods. They're using ML as a tool to support business objectives. This is the group I'm talking about.
The phrase "bent of mind" roughly implies "the way someone thinks". Its usage is declining I suppose but there's nothing connotatively nefarious there.
Accessibility is the sort of thing that has to be regulated into existence because the economic cost-benefit often cannot be justified. Similar to handicap parking, ramps, etc.
I'm not sure if you read the paper, because the analogy is not tenuous. It is a period of training where they require the model to be completely deprived of standard input, and fed noise instead, so that they can essentially flip the sign on the learning rule.
It is a simple, easy to state, hypothesis of what sleep is doing in organic brains, and you should note that there is an extreme paucity of those.
Perhaps the artifical brain referred to in the article is not the kind of artifical brain you're used to reasoning about, but the goal of these researchers is not to optimize their performance on ImageNet, it is to discover how the brain actually organizes itself. You should give it a read.
Please that paper is from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, read it and understand it...or the simple way, steady learning need's some time to analyze restructure and combine the gained information's together witch they call 'sleep'
Blame the system. There can be a lot of pressure to make research accessible. Although generally laudable, I think this can backfire when applied to more abstract topics.
For ~70 years, the brightest minds on earth have been trying and failing to solve AI. Many of them refusing to consider that something useful can be learned from the human brain; the gold standard of what it means to be intelligent.
Yet today, cutting edge deep learning technology is based on a crude and increasingly inaccurate model of neurons.
If we're now making discoveries that are revealing artificial processes that are similar to our own, it's a sign we're headed in the right direction.
Unless we've specifically defined intelligence in a way that reflects ourselves.
The useful things that we want to get out of an AI system, i.e generalized learning of abstract concepts, are most clearly demonstrated by the human brain.
Since we now seem to prefer down votes over discussion, I'll just leave this with my own speculation that the reason for this strange avoidance of the brain is that it's a dead end for both academia and industry.
It's much easier and more profitable to expand on already existing machine learning technologies than to try and find some revolutionary breakthrough in neuroscience.
Well we accepted that animals are intelligent too (no really long ago but still), even that something like a swarm-intelligence exists, but yeah i know what you mean.
EDIT: Wow you changed your comment that much that my comment makes nearly no sense anymore.
I actually think this kind of nonsense comes from the predisposition humans have to empathise and anthropomorphise things.
So, yeah, in a way a brain is like a computer, it works as a metaphor. But no, a brain not a computer in reality. So a poor use of metaphor.
Or in another way, this sort of stuff comes from confusion in conflating the map with the terrain - a map can be useful at one level, but it is not the terrain itself so useless at a different level of observation.
"In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1]"
See modern IRC clients that take 500MB of memory on the desktop. Compare with Orcad Capture a mid 90's schematic capture program that would run acceptably on a 486 with 16MB of memory.
To be clear, the "efficiency with which a resource is used" in this case can be represented roughly by dollar per unit compute. As that value goes down, you would expect software "waste" to go up. That's how the Jevons Paradox applies here.
It's almost like the problem is wanting to be special? Stoicism and tangential philosophies are more critically important than ever, in my opinion. I've also found a great deal of benefit from not participating in social media.
EDIT: There's a related and quite important concept in the contemporary well-being discourse often referred to as 'the dispassionate pursuit of passion [or success]'. I think many of the people who show up on HN would benefit from understanding it. Choosing to not desire being special is not the same thing as being inert. There is a balancing point. Here's a resource (albeit maybe a bit too self-helpy) that talks about this: https://www.happinessacademy.eu/blog-en/the-6th-happiness-si....
You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, ‘living according to Nature,’ means actually the same as ‘living according to life’—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature ‘according to the Stoa,’ and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise— and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is selftyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? ... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to ‘creation of the world,’ the will to the causa prima.
I don’t really subscribe to stoicism (and a lot, but not all, of mindfulness and CBT) for precisely this reason: it seems to me to be telling people that it doesn’t matter if their needs aren’t being met, the real problem is that they have any needs. If it helps you personally, that’s great! But to me stoicism texts often feel like they’re written by some dismissive parent, the kind who would just tell you “only the boring get bored” instead of playing with you when you were a kid :)
To me stoicism is helpful in the sense of the advice one gets in jujitsu: If taking one grip on something isn't getting you the leverage you want, don't grip it harder, let go and take a different grip.
Stoicism can't help if you're just getting traumatized, but a lot of "I feel awful about the world generally" sentiment boils down to having a tense grip on one's worldview, a rigid set of norms leading to the judgment that it is all wrong and terrible and thus to a kind of flagellatory self-harm. Nature as a whole, on the other hand, is indifferent - the "is" instead of the "ought". We learn many oughts when we're young, but they all deserve examination.
It's interesting that you say that. Bertrand Russell writes in "The History of Western Philosphy" that the backdrop against which Stoicism (and Epicureanism for that matter) first flourished was a Greek civilization in decline. Life was becoming harder and harder for a majority of people, so people sought refuge in these two philosophies.
Hmm I think I wasn't clear enough with "Stoicism and tangential philosophies". I didn't mean to imply any one philosophy is necessarily a definitive prescription. Rather, they include various good ideas that should be borrowed and amalgamated into a composite that best fits the individual.
Do you worry that you're taking money at a valuation that's predicated on artificially and transiently elevated demand? It doesn't sound like you have a business compatible with the VC hyper-growth model, outside of the present extraordinary circumstances.
It also feels intuitively like many person counting use cases are satisfactorily addressed by far simpler and lower cost heuristics such as, for example, Google lining up device 'throughput' with lat/long and business records. In fact, I just used their estimate to time my visit to the DMV and it worked perfectly.
Admittedly, it may just be that I'm not creative enough to envision sustainable, valuable use cases for this. But if you've been around 6 (?) years and just took $51M in Series C without being significantly diluted, KP is presumably assigning you at least a $250M valuation and possibly a lot higher. After accounting for terms like e.g. liquidation preference, the economic picture of Density could easily be a house of cards.
Lower cost systems like Google's Popular Times, are not as accurate as they seem. The next time you see a graph on google, you'll notice there's no y-axis. It's a clever way to look like actuals when it's relative to itself. Also we have units in many GPT locations. They're not accurate. On the vc returns thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We'll see.
You're asking good questions about raising capital but the outcome was a rare circumstance where all cofounders, previous investors, new investors, current employees, and the exec team are thrilled. There's a lot to do but the round was right-sized as it was the same amount we planned to raise pre-pandemic.
I suspect many developers would find software a lot less appealing if it were closer to a traditional engineering discipline (slow, unforgiving, dramatically reduced expressive power and creative potential, etc).
I'm somewhat ADD and get bored easily, so not only do I need to do something more like software but I also have to stay as broad and high-level as possible within the discipline, to stave off ennui. NOTE: very much not arguing this is a good way to go through life.
What's considered aesthetically pleasing continually evolves over time. There are underlying trends in physical beauty that resemble what we see in fashion, art, music, etc. Humans also have a quite a lot of control over much of their appearance with hair styling, makeup, and (increasingly) cosmetic surgery. This, combined with the ageism inherent to modeling, adds up to fairly sustained demand.
Being less than 10% of $260b in sales doesn't excuse neglecting the product. Also maybe their Mac sales would be higher if they hadn't destroyed their laptop by replacing the function keys with a touchbar.
It also means, if a critical mass hate developing on Macs, then iOS software will suffer. App store fees are already a business pain point for app developers. And web browsers are getting capable enough now that it's probably feasible for a lot of apps to go back to being browser only.
It's going to be hard to reverse a trend away from Apple if it starts. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft Visual Studio becomes the IDE of choice for iOS development after devs ditch macOS in droves. Microsoft won't play nice.
Apple isn't watching their flanks by letting macOS atrophy and a competitor will step in if they don't cover it.
You act like developers have a choice. Companies go where the money is and developers do what companies tell them. The supremacy of the indie developer died a decade ago.
There are very few apps that could be web only apps that are making money via in app purchases. Most of the money being made in the App Store are pay to win games. Most of the subscriptions apps that use to allow in app purchases are already forcing users to pay outside of the App Store - including Netflix and Spotify.
Hair loss is on the precipice of being effectively solved (infinite transplants via stem cells) and the price will likely go down over the next 5 to 10 years as the technology to produce hair follicles and perform robotic transplantations matures.
Skin is also a largely solved problem: use moisturizer/sunscreen/Vitamin C/Retin A, avoid the sun as much as possible, wear sunglasses, drink lots of water, eat healthy + high antioxidants, sleep well, get minor amounts of Botox occasionally for some parts of the face, microneedling occasionally, maybe a face lift (these days a more or less perfected procedure with low risk) somewhere in your 40s/50s. That plan will basically take you into your 60s looking really good. Even if you can't stick to that plan, the various restorative dermatological options will still give you a fantastic result. But most people are some combination of too apathetic, too lazy, too financially-constrained, or too afraid of more invasive techniques.
"Hair loss is on the precipice of being effectively solved "
They have been saying this for 50 years. Even the technology we use today is sketchy.
"Skin is also a largely solved problem: "
This is ridiculously false.
>70% of women do many or most of those things, and they still mostly look their age. Those things help, but very mildly. There are no 55 year old women who look 30 without airbrushing + tons of makeup + facelifts.
And 80 year old women mostly look 80.
The amount of money and effort, especially women spend on this is breathtaking, considering that most of it doesn't work better than the cheaper products.
If there was something that would make 50 year olds actually look 30 it would be would have 'infinity' market value.
You're well behind the cutting edge of hair loss science [1]. It's quite clear from your comment that you haven't read anything about the most recent developments.
If you want a good example of what's now possible with anti-aging, look at Tom Ford. He's 58 and could easily pass for a 30 year old. The techniques he's using to look that way will be further refined and become more widely accessible (economically) over the next 10-20 years.
You really have no idea what you're talking about and you're clearly not someone who's actually read any related research or studied these subjects in any kind of depth. The irony is that you first pointed out the tremendous economic incentive to solve hair and skin degradation and then engaged in incoherent contortions in order to argue that these problems have somehow magically remained unperturbed by profit-maximizing agents. A mind-boggling cognitive dissonance.
PhDs are one especially crappy way to prove you have the intellectual chops to engage with ML. There are far more direct, practical, and expedient alternative paths to get there.
Importantly, the number of people who were perfectly capable of doing a PhD but chose not to (because, frankly, it's a very bad deal) vastly dwarfs the number of people who stuck around in academia and obtained one. Additionally, my observation at several major tech companies is that PhDs have a bent of mind that is roughly orthogonal to the pursuit of real business value.