24. Xander Steenbrugge - Machine learning as a creative tool, and the quest for artificial general intelligence
Towards Data Science
03/10/20
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Most machine learning models are used in roughly the same way: they take a complex, high-dimensional input (like a data table, an image, or a body of text) and return something very simple (a classification or regression output, or a set of cluster centroids). That makes machine learning ideal for automating repetitive tasks that might historically have been carried out only by humans.
But this strategy may not be the most exciting application of machine learning in the future: increasingly, researchers and even industry players are experimenting with generative models, that produce much more complex outputs like images and text from scratch. These models are effectively carrying out a creative process — and mastering that process hugely widens the scope of what can be accomplished by machines.
My guest today is Xander Steenbrugge, and his focus is on the creative side of machine learning. In addition to consulting with large companies to help them put state-of-the-art machine learning models into production, he’s focused a lot of his work on more philosophical and interdisciplinary questions — including the interaction between art and machine learning. For that reason, our conversation went in an unusually philosophical direction, covering everything from the structure of language, to what makes natural language comprehension more challenging than computer vision, to the emergence of artificial general intelligence, and how all these things connect to the current state of the art in machine learning.
Previous Episode
I can’t remember how many times I’ve forgotten something important.
I’m sure it’s a regular occurrence though: I constantly forget valuable life lessons, technical concepts and useful bits of statistical theory. What’s worse, I often forget these things after working bloody hard to learn them, so my forgetfulness is just a giant waste of time and energy.
That’s why I jumped at the chance to chat with Iain Harlow, VP of Science at Cerego — a company that helps businesses build training courses for their employees by optimizing the way information is served to maximize retention and learning outcomes.
Iain knows a lot about learning and has some great insights to share about how you can optimize your own learning, but he’s also got a lot of expertise solving data science problems and hiring data scientists — two things that he focuses on in his work at Cerego. He’s also a veteran of the academic world, and has some interesting observations to share about the difference between research in academia and research in industry.
Next Episode
It’s easy to think of data scientists as “people who explore and model data”. Bur in reality, the job description is much more flexible: your job as a data scientist is to solve problems that people actually have with data.
You’ll notice that I wrote “problems that people actually have” rather than “build models”. It’s relatively rare that the problems people have actually need to be solved using a predictive model. Instead, a good visualization or interactive chart is almost always the first step of the problem-solving process, and can often be the last as well.
And you know who understands visualization strategy really, really well? Plotly, that’s who. Plotly is a company that builds a ton of great open-source visualization, exploration and data infrastructure tools (and some proprietary commercial ones, too). Today, their tooling is being used by over 50 million people worldwide, and they’ve developed a number of tools and libraries that are now industry standard. So you can imagine how excited I was to speak with Plotly co-founder and Chief Product Officer Chris Parmer.
Chris had some great insights to share about data science and analytics tooling, including the future direction he sees the space moving in. But as his job title suggests, he’s also focused on another key characteristic that all great data scientists develop early on: product instinct (AKA: “knowing what to build next”).
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