Machine learning is still too hard for software engineers
&quot;Machine Learning is too difficult&quot; ... says company selling &quot;ML platform [which] can be used by anyone and it only takes minutes to train your first model.&quot;<p>No, actually, you&#x27;re just being dishonest. Even if you hide TensorFlow and the keras models behind a nice GUI, people still need that mathematics knowledge to succeed. And yes, pre-training is great. But you need a shitload of stochastic analysis to make sure that the pre-trained embedding won&#x27;t distort your results.<p>&quot;For a software engineer, the hardest thing about developing Machine Learning functionality should be finding clean and representative ground-truth data, but it often isn’t.&quot;<p>That is (in my opinion) an entirely bogus request. Machine learning is a mathematical &#x2F; statistical tool for modeling large unknown functions. I feel like this sentence is akin in usefulness to:<p>&quot;For a nuclear power plant, the hardest thing about building one should be to draw how the finished building will look like in the press release&quot;.<p>Someone &quot;doing&quot; machine learning without the requisite math knowledge is effectively driving blind. And worse than that, they don&#x27;t even know what they don&#x27;t see, because they lack the skills to identify their blind spots. That&#x27;s how you end up with a &quot;tank detection AI&quot; that in reality just classifies the weather into bright vs. dark. [1]<p>Companies like this who promise advanced mathematical algorithms with no prior skill or knowledge are how we unleash a plague of buggy unverified automatons upon the world.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;5o3CxyvZ2XKawRB5w&#x2F;machine-learning-and-unintended-consequences" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;5o3CxyvZ2XKawRB5w&#x2F;machine-le...</a>