Re:Can we rule out near-term AGI? [video]
by gdb on Thursday November 08, 2018 @05:52PM
(#18410806)
(I gave the talk.)
> I've likely lost any shot I had at contributing in areas that will advance the state of the art since I graduated college 20 years ago.
For a bit of optimism: if you are a good software engineer, you can become a contributor in a modern AI research lab like OpenAI. We hire software engineers to do pure software engineering, and can also train them to do the machine learning themselves (cf https://blog.openai.com/spinning-up-in-deep-rl/ or our Fellows and Scholars programs).
As one concrete example, though not the norm, our Dota team has no machine learning PhDs (though about half had prior modern ML experience)!
> I've likely lost any shot I had at contributing in areas that will advance the state of the art since I graduated college 20 years ago.
For a bit of optimism: if you are a good software engineer, you can become a contributor in a modern AI research lab like OpenAI. We hire software engineers to do pure software engineering, and can also train them to do the machine learning themselves (cf https://blog.openai.com/spinning-up-in-deep-rl/ or our Fellows and Scholars programs).
As one concrete example, though not the norm, our Dota team has no machine learning PhDs (though about half had prior modern ML experience)!