80% of all machine learning engineers work at Google or Facebook

Here’s how the rest of us can do meaningful things with artificial intelligence or machine learning since all of the current AI experts are already working for Google and Facebook.

Source: https://t.co/yhbmPqhUKj

First and foremost, I’m going to argue that you don’t necessarily need a PhD to be an AI expert.

In order to get a PhD, you need to have completed a doctoral thesis, which is a lengthy research project usually mixed with additional education, done with close supervision by another academic. This is, in general, a good thing. We want research, we want knowledge, we want people to get PhDs.

In the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence, PhD work often centers around developing new algorithms to accomplish more and more computationally complex things. Perhaps if we can boost the accuracy of a face detection algorithm from 97.3% to 97.7% we’ll have accomplished something worthwhile.

In the world of practical AI such intense research on algorithms and new methods of computation take a long time to become useful, because they are often not optimized…