Teamwork Makes the AI Work
To achieve something great with AI, you must have equally great AI algorithms made by people waist-deep in machine learning, Bill explains. They must understand the whole lifecycle of machine learning, make their algorithms available via understandable developer APIs, and run it at an internet scale. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is primarily investing millions of dollars in hiring scholars with degrees in machine learning from reputable institutions. You need both machine learning people to create the algorithm, but you also need the software developers to create the APIs and internet scale architectures. Bill likens this teamwork to building a soccer team - if you want to compete in, say, the European League, you wouldn’t go out and hire the 11 best goalies in the world. “To do anything good or anything excellent, you need to get different disciplines not just coordinating together, but actually collaborating,” he advises. “That requires them to have a bit of a T-shaped skill set; where they are deep in something like engineering, but they know just enough about design to understand how the designers add value, and when they should proactively reach out to them rather than just showing up to a couple of status meetings every week and coordinating.” [Listen from 26:40]
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