Why I May Be Delusional

Why I May Be Delusional

Or some things to be careful about, as I continue to commit my time and energy towards machine learning, artificial intelligence, and keeping up with a very fast industry.

I like solving problems. I like the feeling of stretching to meet a situation. It thrills me to get it right. If I can continue to play the game, I’ll be a happy man. But, what value does that add? If I get the code to work, the application to ship, the organization to cohere around a problem, so what? If others can solve this problem better than I can, then I better pay attention.

Put another way, I’m going to spend the next 90 days (countdown ticking towards October 1 when I officially kick off) learning NLP as well as I can. However far I get, what skills I have will be completely tractable, from building models offline to deploying and maintaining them. How many more cycles will it take to fully grasp NLP concepts? 2? 3? So, I put 9 months of my life into getting to the state of the art with things. How many times will I move the needle? If I spend the third cycle following Jeremy Howard very closely, I’ll at least know where that edge is and what is to be gained by crossing it.

Meanwhile, there’s an army of PhDs who are moving that needle every day. They’re patenting their work, giving it to their employers. The veritable intelligence of that tidal wave is astounding.

Better to get the pipeline right. Better to get the fit of the technology to the problems people care about. Better to own and enhance the data. Better to have meaningful conversations with people on the ground taking things on. That’s where the value is.

It’s not that I have to be the best, or even keep up to add value. It’s that I must know where I am compared to others, whether I’m contributing anything empirically. Maybe so. We’ll see.

I’m not changing course. I’m learning this stuff. At the very least, I can become a kick-ass director of machine learning at a mid-sized company. I can be a strong CTO in an age of machine learning. Give me the hill, at least one more time, and let me see what I can do. If, as I’d like, I can wrap my arms around contracts, conversations, and agreements, then I’ve put myself in the heart of making a difference. Then, more than my technical skills alone, I’m working on moving the needle forward for people, rather than just technology.