opinion
The future is bright for those who focus on value creation over technical mastery.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion article. I'd love to hear your thoughts and counterarguments in the comments.
There is much doom and gloom on the scene.
Hiring is frozen.
…Some have hypothesized that investors will lose hope in AI altogether. Google has frozen hiring of ML researchers. Uber laid off half of the research division of his AI team…he will have far more people with ML skills than ML jobs.
– chip fuen
A recession is coming.
people are talking about AI winter.
It's no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data science (DS) are the first to suffer. They are a luxury for most companies.
But that doesn't mean the future isn't bright.
If you want to create value.
AI winter is a period when funding and interest in AI research decreases.
But most of us don't do research. We read papers, get ideas and innovate…but use existing technology.
Additionally, the popularity of building products with ML does not necessarily correlate with the amount of research published.
In fact, the amount of unapplied research is increasing. Anecdotally, the industry is still playing catch-up in implementing machine learning, which was invented decades ago.
“AI-powered” products are becoming more popular today, not because of new research, but because ML is more approachable.
The opposite is also true.
Classical algorithms + domain knowledge + niche datasets solve most real-world problems, not deep neural networks. Most of us aren't working on self-driving cars.
I wrote about this in “''.Democratizing AI is pointless, data is in silos, and how to do it…
