Flax, a big neural network JAX library, is developed and used by Brain. TF will stay around for boilerplate / data-loading, but JAX support probably isn’t going anywhere.
My job used to be about developing ML models for diagnostics (not vision, but other modalities). It mattered to me, it was fun and informative, and aspects of that company were a net positive.
Current job is about research in ML in general and no, I don't think it would matter a lot in the long term, but it's interesting and may turn out to be positive.
The comments are similar, but the energy is different.
One of them read to me like "go and strive to be great in one of the million directions possible" and the other was "you won't win on any direction more than average, so settle down and live simple".
Strong opinion, but I think that if you want to learn facts, you can learn them faster on your own. If you want to learn a new skill, you need somebody to check your ideas until you can get to a level where you can self-correct yourself.
> II'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.
Sure, and I agree, most of the time I would prefer to study on my own instead of going to the lecture. However, it was incredibly useful to have an expert that could align my understanding whenever I was off to the wrong path; I think those were the opportunities for learning, not reading facts of off the board.
> There's no guarantee of that in any case.
Let's say that it's significantly more likely that you have practised on a variety of easy to hard problems in your field of interest if you have taken good courses from a university versus doing your own work. I believe that when you pick your own homework, it's natural to cherry-pick problems that seem simple.
> I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field.
That would (and does) describe research divisions in industry too.
>I pretty much never learned anything of note directly from a teacher.
I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on. It's this interaction that I find valuable, not just stating facts on a blackboard. As I have taught mathematics myself at the university level, I find that students don't really need me to read them the facts, I was more there to align their understanding.
As for consistency, I meant that you won't get to cherry-pick the topics that you like when learning on your own (or solve the problem sets that you find simple), which is a natural thing to do by the way. If you have your own curriculum and you stick to it, that's great, but I have found that when I allowed students to pick their own problems for homework, they grew weaker in some areas and stronger in others. This also didn't give me enough signal on their understanding in general, which meant that it deprived them of useful feedback.
> but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets.
Absolutely! I didn't mean consistency in terms of pushing out duplicates of the same, but consistency in terms of attacking a variety of problems in some course, allowing you to become well-rounded in your understanding. Once you reach that level, you can fill in the gaps and be comparable to a colleague that maybe had a slightly different curriculum.
> Having a paper written in 10 days accepted in the best conference of the field increased both my imposter syndrome, and the feeling that we are writing useless crap.
Are you sure you are not harsh on yourself? :) Maybe it was a good paper. If you are so worried, you can always ask the conference reviewers for comments; maybe they thought it was excellent.
> useless crap
You get enough "useless crap" down as knowledge and, who knows, one day you get to flying cars or the proof of Goldbach's conjecture.
> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own.
I think this statement is lacking some truth. We can rewrite it as:
> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own, but it can take significantly more time and there's no guarantee of consistency (compared to someone learning with a teacher).
>some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field.
Yes, and part of this process is having your work peer-reviewed as novel by active researchers in the field of interest (and getting advice/corrections from them along the way to the finish). I see this as an integral part of the process.