SamHalen
Bronze Contributor
FASTLANE INSIDER
Read Millionaire Fastlane
I've Read UNSCRIPTED
Speedway Pass
So guys where do you see industry going in the upcoming years? Is it worth to dig deep into AI/Data Science if you will want to create something (considering you aren't a huge company like Google, Amazon etc.) and you're building from a ground up. Or is it better to go more into creating hardware/IOT stuff that will be needed for computation and also to gather data? If you would decide now to study one of them, which one you would go to?![]()
The "frontiers" of AI are light years ahead of what you and I can access from online courses. Source: I manage an online course and it's taken me months just to create tutorials. I've heard of a few successful AI startups but they mostly get VC funding and have founders who went to Ivy league schools.
A more "fastlane" approach is to feed the crowd. What are the needs that all of these AI companies and people will need? All of these are unattractive, which means that there's less competition.
Skills
Sales and marketing of machine learning models
- How can you prove that your model is worth $100/customer? Data scientists tend to come from technical backgrounds. I worked as a predictive modeler who would create the models and PowerPoint decks, but then we'd turn them over to our sales team who would sell them to clients.
- My current course has about 30% of the curriculum just on communication. Basic things like writing, combining graphs/statistics into understandable language. The person who can explain their algorithm/AI wizardry in simpler language is worth more money than the person who struggles with communication.
- Data cleaning, integrity, and reducing error. How can you know that your data is going to be consistent? "Garbage In; Garbage out." Data scientists need to know this, but it's not new! It's been around in Database language since SQL was invented in the 1980s... but people don't want to learn it because it's "boring".
- Writing documentation.... Ugh. Is there anything that a data scientist hates more than doing this? Probably not. This task tends to get outsources to junior team members because it sucks. But the probme is that only the "expert" who created the model is knowleagable enough to write good documentation.
- How to use cloud services. There are basically three big competitors - Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services.
- Companies concerned about data privacy still are hesitent to use the cloud, unless they are massive and have boat loads of money to spend on R&D.
- Getting models into "Production". It's easy for someone to take their Python or R and make some AI tool, but it takes a lot longer to get it ready to be used in real-time. Most of the time this needs to be translated from R/Python into some other framework like JavaScript/Scale (?), Julia, etc. This is one of those tasks that data scientists hate.
- Budgeting... The cloud offers "unlimited scalability" but with that comes unlimited costs. At my former company, we ran into major problems with cost overruns. We were using a machine learning model which was designed to run on about 100 GB of data, but then we had a client that had 100TB of data. The cloud computing costs went from about 20% of the costs (for normal clients) to 60% of the costs. This could have been avoided if we had knowledge of how to manage costs.
- How do we hire the person with the right credentials?
- Hire only Phd's
- Hire Master's degree people and hope that their degree is actually useful
- Put them through a rigourous hiring process involving technical projects, background checks with previous managers, reviews of their github/kaggle projects, and numerous on-site interviews and "white board" questions
- How do we know if a "data scientist" from India who is selling themselves on Upwork for $500/hr is legit or not?
- Analytics managers have "continuing education" requirements like doctor's do. As algorithms get more complicated, it becomes more difficult to keep staff up to date. There's a growing need for corporate training. Remember all of that "Data Privacy" training that you were required to take? Imagine "AI Privacy" training in 3 years.
- Learning platforms - My site is build using Moodle, which is good because it has a ton of open source documentation.. but there are newer platforms which have more features such as zoom integration, templated content (think Wordpress) for quickly making new courses, and so forth.
Don't like ads? Remove them while supporting the forum. Subscribe.