If Google were created from scratch today, much of it would be learned, not coded. Around 10% of Google’s 25,000 developers are proficient in ML; it should be 100% — Jeff Dean
Like the weather, everybody complains about programming, but nobody does anything about it. That’s changing and like an unexpected storm the change comes from an unexpected direction: Machine Learning / Deep Learning.
I know, you are tired of hearing about Deep Learning. Who isn’t by now? But programming has been stuck in a rut for a very long time and it’s time we do something about it.
Lots of silly little programming wars continue to be fought that decide nothing. Functions vs objects; this language vs that language; this public cloud vs that public cloud vs this private cloud vs that ‘fill in the blank’; REST vs unrest; this byte level encoding vs some different one; this framework vs that framework; this methodology vs that methodology; bare metal vs containers vs VMs vs unikernels; monoliths vs microservices vs nanoservices; eventually consistent vs transactional; mutable vs immutable; DevOps vs NoOps vs SysOps; scale-up vs scale-out; centralized vs decentralized; single threaded vs massively parallel; sync vs async. And so on ad infinitum.
It’s all pretty much the same shite different day. We are just creating different ways of calling functions that we humans still have to write. The real power would be in getting a machine to write the functions. And that’s what Machine Learning can do, write functions for us. Machine Learning might just might be some different kind of shite for a different day.
Read the full article: Machine Learning Driven Programming on High Scalability
There’s a war between two visions of how the ubiquitous AI assisted future will be rendered: on the cloud or on the device. And as with any great drama it helps the story along if we have two archetypal antagonists. On the cloud side we have Google. On the device side we have Apple. Who will win? Both? Neither? Or do we all win?
If you would have asked me a week ago I would have said the cloud would win. Definitely. If you read an article like Jeff Dean On Large-Scale Deep Learning At Google you can’t help but be amazed at what Google is accomplishing. Impressive. Wide ranging. Smart. Systematic. Dominant.
Apple has been largely absent from the trend of sprinkling deep learning fairy dust on their products. This should not be all that surprising. Apple moves at their own pace. Apple doesn’t reach for early adopters, they release a technology when it’s a win for the mass consumer market.
There’s an idea because Apple is so secretive they might have hidden away vast deep learning chops we don’t even know about yet. We, of course, have no way of knowing.
What may prove more true is that Apple is going about deep learning in a different way: differential privacy + powerful on device processors + offline training with downloadable models + a commitment to really really not knowing anything personal about you + the deep learning equivalent of perfect forward secrecy.
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