Wednesday 22 December 2021

What are working professionals missing in their AI education? (2021)


Peter Norvig is the co-author of a very widely used AI textbook. HERE is an interview with him about AI, including AI education. 

It includes the following Q&A.

What are working professionals missing in their AI education?

In AI education teachers assign a simple well-defined problem with a given dataset and a pre-defined objective. Students then see their job as building a model that maximizes the objective function. But in a real world project, professionals need to define the objectives and collect or generate the data on their own. You don’t get credit for choosing an especially clever or mathematically sophisticated model, you get credit for solving problems for your users. 

In my own experience, you could take out "AI" and replace it with "Data Analysis", and the statement would remain 100% true.