AI News
The ‘World Cup’ of AI policy kicks off - Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone’s dropping AI policies at the moment? Last week, the Biden administration dropped its first executive order on AI safety, and the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the U.S., and the EU) quickly followed by releasing a voluntary code of conduct for AI companies. Today, over 100 AI leaders are arriving in Bletchley Park, UK for a landmark AI safety summit spearheaded by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. You can follow the action here and watch Elon’s fireside chat with Rishi on X.
Tips and Tricks
The conspiracy to make AI seem harder than it is - Gustav Söderström is the Co-President and CTO of Spotify. In this short and accessible talk, he provides an intro to the technical foundations of GenAI suitable for all, including those who “don’t know a lot of math.” The talk resonated a lot with me because of my own journey moving into AI from a non-traditional background. The video’s about 90 minutes long - check it out!
What’s New in XGBoost 2.0 - XGBoost is a staple of many data science workflows, so I was particularly excited to see that the new version of XGBoost includes better support for Quantile Regression, PySpark, and a few other tricks to reduce memory usage and prevent overfitting.
📣 Sponsor slot 📣 theSQLgym: Learn SQL in your browser through 100s of practice questions. It’s completely free to get started, and by working your way through the questions on this site, you’ll improve your SQL skills and be better prepared to handle all sorts of data.
Fun fact: I (Matt) am the creator of theSQLgym! I thought it would be a helpful resource for my fellow Data Scientists/Analysts.
Career Corner
Stop going deeper in ML, and become a better Software Engineer: “On average, being a skilled software developer will net you far greater returns as a data scientist than having deep knowledge of ML” - Sankar Srinivasan, Senior Data Scientist. I found this post by Sankar very thought-provoking, and it chimes well with my own experience - since learning Django (Python web development framework), I’ve become a much better programmer and my Data Science skills have increased notably. If you’re interested in going deeper with Python, Sankar is hoping to start a book club going through the book 𝘍𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘗𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘯 by Luciano Ramalho. Comment on his post to get involved!
The AI research job market sh*t show (and my experience): Nathan Lambert is an ML Scientist with the kind of résumé that makes your head turn. He’s got a Ph.D. from Berkeley AI Research, previously worked at HuggingFace, and writes an awesome newsletter which I wanted to give a shoutout for. In this post, he writes about the impact of GenAI on the AI job market, particularly for PhDs and those coming from research backgrounds. He writes: “Jobs in GenAI and LLMs are plentiful, everything else is on ice (but thawing)”.
One more thing…
Could you help me out by filling in the poll below? We’ve had a lot of new sign-ups recently and this will help me make sure I’m pitching the content correctly.