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Most Impactful AI Trends of 2018: The Rise of ML Engineering
Most Impactful AI Trends of 2018: The Rise of ML Engineering
rise of ML Engineering
And what to look forward to in 2019
As a field that has consistently toed the line between its origins in
academic research and the need to serve customer needs, it has often
been hard to reconcile engineering standards with ML models. As both
research and applied teams are doubling down on their engineering
and infrastructure needs, the nascent field of ML Engineering will build
upon 2018’s foundation and truly blossom in 2019.
• Draw a parallel to how I think they’ll affect 2019 in three key ways
One of the most impressive trends in 2018 has been various models’
growing ability to capture increasingly useful information in dense
learned representations. Here are a few examples below:
2. Scaling up
The scale of compute (credit to OpenAI)
• OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot plays 180 years worth of games against itself
every day during training.
This past year, more companies have started to publicize the scale of
the tooling they have built internally to help support their ML efforts.
Here are a few personal favorites:
More and more people realize that nobody needs yet another library
or tutorial to build a 3-layer neural network on MNIST.
Consequently, many startups have entered the space of data and model
infrastructure, management and deployment, and educational
resources have started to focus on these aspects more. This is why, I
fundamentally believe that 2019 will be the year of ML Engineering.
I’ll explain how I see this unfolding below!
Now that many large companies have laid the ground work for best
practices when it comes to building ML products, and that many teams
are being forced to reinvent the wheel when it comes to building the
majority of their modeling pipeline, we are finally at the right moment
for open-source ML Engineering frameworks.
These are crucial skills, that usually make or break a data product, and
there is a shortage of resources and best practices to help guide
practitioners. When surveyed, this is the type of content that most
experienced ML professionals in my network want more of, since it
related to the problems they face every day, which leads me to my last
point.
At the same time, most aspiring Data Scientists and ML Engineers are
most excited about training models on provided datasets. This
excitement is usually inspired by blogs and courses that have focused
on that part of the work, instead of data gathering/labeling/cleaning
and model deployment.