Software Engineering Daily

Machine learning frameworks like Torch and TensorFlow have made the job of a machine learning engineer much easier. But machine learning is still hard. Debugging a machine learning model is a slow, messy process.

A bug in a machine learning model does not always mean a complete failure. Your model could continue to deliver usable results even in the presence of a mistaken implementation. Perhaps you made a mistake when cleaning your data, leading to an incorrectly trained model.

It is a general rule in computer science that partial failures are harder to fix than complete failures. In this episode, Zayd Enam describes the different dimensions on which a machine learning model can develop an error. Zayd is a machine learning researcher at the Stanford AI Lab, so I also asked him about AI risk, job displacement, and academia versus industry.

Show Notes

Why ML is hard

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