100%, I think the US really REALLY needs to figure out a universal basic income soon, and they aren't going to do it and life is going to suck

Such a stupid technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome

Tldr - they noticed the X chromosome was weird, so they called it X. Then Y was the next letter. Then Z and W came about to distinguish between the ZW system and the XY system (also it's important to note that the X chromosome is the X chromosome, period, whether it's in a mouse or a human or whatever--it refers to a specific thing that plays a specific role).

The roles where you do a little of both are the most fun! I used to do the algo work, now I work entirely on the infra side of things at one of the larger corps. We support some massive teams that have their own platform team between the AI devs and us, and also some smaller teams where the AI devs do it all themselves and just talk to us directly.

In all cases, where I am now and in my previous infra-only role, the AI teams were kinda stuck on our Linux shit for the reasons I described--specifically, you need to write stuff differently (or use an SDK that's tightly coupled to the underlying compute) for distributed training so there's no real point running it locally.

I personally REALLY miss the ability to develop and test locally with a real IDE, so I hope something changes--however, the trend is heading towards better remote development, not making stuff work on Mac.

I'm a little confused by some of the answers here, not sure if it's because this sub skews towards academia/early career or maybe I'm just out of touch.

Pretty much anywhere in the industry your $3000 M1 Mac is going to be used for either opening up a tab in Chrome or, at most, the rigorous task of SSHing into a Linux VM. There are basically two reasons:

• Large, public companies typically don't allow their user/production data to exist on any machine that has internet access--you can get in very deep shit or in some cases even fired for having it stored locally--so that's game over for a MBP automatically.
• Most companies of any size will have some need for distributed training. That means you need a platform to schedule training jobs, or else your GPUs will sit idle and you'll go bankrupt. That means maintaining compatible versions of TF/PT, CUDA, and GCC, which eventually means building their own distribution of TF/PT. They're not going to bother building a separate distro for two different flavors of MBP floating around in addition to production. Often, your model code doesn't work in the absence of the platform SDKs, because, for example, they need to be able to authenticate with S3 or HDFS or wherever the data is stored.

I'm not sure that any company besides Apple will ever invest in Apple's M1 shit specifically, but nobody uses TPUs and that doesn't stop Google from pushing it every chance they get. However, a lot of the industry is getting more and more pissed at NVIDIA, which may in turn open things up to local development in the future.

Jay Alammar - https://jalammar.github.io/

Papers with code - https://paperswithcode.com/

Distill although they quit last year - https://distill.pub/

And Chris Olah although it's pretty much all on Distill - http://colah.github.io

That said, a lot of the most interesting stuff comes from younger people who start out writing to improve their own understanding, and are still at a stage in their careers where they get to actually be hands-on with interesting stuff. If you limit yourself only to "distinguished" engineers from major tech companies, it's generally going to be boring as shit.

You can also look up research/engineering blogs from Huggingface, FAIR, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Uber, and anywhere else that has a strong open source culture. Just pick a few places that do something you're interested in.

This is amazing. I have been following your work for years, you do a tremendous service for the entire community/industry!