An AI-Driven Hollywood Shutdown?
Plus career tips from a Spotify Data Scientist, and highlights of the latest release of scikit-learn
Hey y’all (and Happy Monday!),
The world of AI moves at a meteoric pace, and this week has been no different.
We’ve seen striking actors, investor panic and more GenAI hype. Yet, in the midst of this chaos, it’s strangely comforting to see old favourites like scikit-learn ticking along in the background with new releases. In this week’s AI in Five, I’ll share info on all these topics, and highlight some fantastic career advice from Spotify Data Scientist Khouloud El Alami.
Oh - and one more thing - I’d love it if you could fill out my poll at the end of this newsletter :)
AI News & Commentary
The Black Mirror plot about AI that worries actors - For the first time in 43 years, Hollywood actors are striking, citing concerns about the impact of AI on the film industry. The whole thing feels eerily similar to a recent Black Mirror episode (Joan Is Awful), and I enjoyed this clear and non-hyped BBC article, which outlines the 5 main AI concerns voiced by SAG-AFTRA (one of the big trade unions for actors).
Is the AI stock boom a dot-com-style bubble? - There’s been so much hype around AI-related investment opportunities that it’s hard to keep track. Earlier this week, Emad Mostaque (founder and CEO of open-source company Stability AI) likened the current AI hype to the “dot com bubble” of the early 2000s, but if you’re after a more nuanced perspective, check out this Insider article which brings multiple opinions from different angles. One thing I think we can all agree on, however, is that “dot AI bubble” doesn’t really have a great ring to it… time for a rebrand?
Career Corner
A Spotify Data Scientist’s Guide to Turning Your Insights into Impactful Actions - Khouloud is a skilled writer and I highly recommend her content. In this article, she talks about how to navigate office politics and changing business priorities to maximise your impact as a Data Scientist. I really like how she distills this down into “The Data Scientist Formula" (Maths + Code + Business Acumen + Soft Skills = Data Scientist)
Tips & Tricks
How to Use Generative AI Tools While Still Protecting Your Privacy - Given that “Essentially, anything you input into or produce with an AI tool is likely to be used to further refine the AI and then to be used as the developer sees fit,” it’s super important to be vigilant when using these tools. This article gives three practical tips on staying safe while using these tools: (1) Always Check the Privacy Policy Before Use, (2) Watch What You Share, and (3) Change the Settings.
Introducing the latest release of scikit-learn, v1.3 - Scikit-learn is a foundational Python library for Data Science, and recently released its latest version. If you’re not using the latest version, I can highly recommend running
pip install --upgrade scikit-learnorconda install -c conda-forge scikit-learn. This release is a big win for Data Scientists and ML folk, and I’m a big fan of the ability to group infrequent categories via the updatedpreprocessing.OrdinalEncoderclass
Thanks for reading! That’s all for this week.
One more thing
I’m keen to get your input on what this newsletter should include. What would you like more of going forward?
If you like the newsletter, it would mean a lot if you passed it on to others who might be interested.
And, if you haven’t yet subscribed…
👀
Have a great week,
Matt