freshfunk t1_iw2d6wi wrote on November 12, 2022 at 12:33 PM

I work at a FAANG and seeing some accurate and some inaccurate things here.

Overall, AI is seen as a key factor to success against competition. AI driven ranking changes can be incredibly impactful in the right context and the downstream ROI tremendous.
ML Engineering jobs are still incredibly sought after.
Pure research might be a different story due to lack of ROI. But research that can be incorporated and applied to product will be seen as valuable because of point 1.

Any company that needs to do stuff at scale will likely need to use ML. Looking at Twitter for example shows a lot of opportunity for ML (spam, abuse detection, feed ranking).

The future of ML jobs is incredibly bright and only going to grow from here.

crazymonezyy t1_iw2gfjm wrote on November 12, 2022 at 1:07 PM

Wait what, Twitter's hiring again? They literally just laid off entire divisions a week ago, which included a lot of ML teams from what I read.

freshfunk t1_iw2h4uo wrote on November 12, 2022 at 1:15 PM

No, I wasn’t saying they were hiring. I was saying their products would benefit a lot from deploying more ML.

crazymonezyy t1_iw2nrnl wrote on November 12, 2022 at 2:16 PM

Oh, ok well Musk holds the exact opposite view as a general rule[1] and a guy I follow on Twitter who was a Senior ML engineer in one of the content teams there was laid off, and he's not the only one from his team let go either.

While you've picked a great example from a technical perspective, company wise it's the last place where I'll expect any expansion of ML funding/budget over the next year unless Elon hires somebody else to be CEO.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyqw3EMCckU

plocco-tocco t1_iw2qj38 wrote on November 12, 2022 at 2:39 PM

He says unless you have to use ML, don't do it. I see no other way to detect spam for example other than ML.

crazymonezyy t1_iw334hf wrote on November 12, 2022 at 4:13 PM

Well I'm on this sub and ML is my job so I obviously see that and I agree but as a thought experiment consider this- if you basically paywall Twitter/get rid of the feed curation entirely it's already going to have some sort of spam reducing effect.

With where he's going with the verification process and his previous rant about bots I think something that'll soon be Twitter is what 2010 Facebook was like - you only see content from people you friend and only they can see your posts unless you want to take the risk of opening up to the public. Only way to make this model profitable though is the $8 fee to absorb the impact of not showing ads in the feed, and if a critical mass of your users sign up you can make all posts "verified only".

Not saying you can solve a hard problem like spam without ML, but you can greatly reduce the noticeability of spam if you don't let anybody interact with anybody else without their explicit consent.

The downstream effect this has is you can invest 1/10th the budget you originally had to fight spam and still not have your platform go down the gutter.

plocco-tocco t1_iw3872w wrote on November 12, 2022 at 4:49 PM

I mean this is just speculation but I don't think that the spam rn is happening because Twitter is free. It's because it's profitable and as long as it's profitable it will happen. The only way I think Twitter can reduce spam by asking for user verification.

ML also has the benefit of scaling well. If you build a ML system to detect spam, I wouldn't say there's much difference in development costs if you 10x the user base and I do not see Twitter not having such a ML system. The model isn't going to be 1/10 as cheaper to train and the size of the engineering team isn't going to be 1/10 too.

As per ML in general, I doubt we are going to see a decline, all these layoffs in big tech and ML teams are basically the only ones that are still hiring over the board. I think that's it is pretty clear that investment in ML saves money by now, it can automate processes for a fraction of the cost. My experience is only in research tho, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

freshfunk t1_iw30n9w wrote on November 12, 2022 at 3:55 PM

Let’s see. Obviously ML is a core part of Tesla and he’s said in the past he sees it as a key to fixing Twitter. I wouldn’t read too much into his current cuts because he’s also just trying to cut what he perceives is dead weight. Maybe the guy who was cut wasn’t shipping.