118 karma · joined March 7, 2018
The problem is that once you start you are committed for 4 years. Abandoning a PhD program and starting another one is quite more complicated than changing of job.
In real life I would never even look at eyes of a stranger.
Probably some people here can relate.
I found useful the diagrammatic notation, by the way.
However, tooling for deep learning in general is not ready for industry grade technology. Many bugs could be prevented by dependent types, but compilers are not there. Also, debugging models feels like alchemy and random changes until it works. In addition, in production systems, rigorous testing is not a standard. The closest thing I have heard of is Tesla's data engine and AI system, they do have unit tests and a shadow mode. Of course big companies will have similar technologies for critical systems, but it's not as standardized as testing in software engineering.
As you said, the test subset should only be used at the very last.
If by symbolic AI we mean GOFAI, expert systems etc, I don't think that there will be ever a resurgence. But if by symbolic AI we mean machine learning algorithms that are somehow based on symbolic reasoning, I do think that there will be a resurgence. In particular, this resurgence will start when: a) Deep learning arrives to its limit (ie. research gets stuck) and/or b) Someone finds a scalable and SOTA-ish way to integrate symbols into gradient based algorithms.
I agree that most popular dynamic are quite terrible. But, honestly, I think the real problem is not the particular implementations, but the whole idea of dynamic typing. At first it did make sense, but now that compiler writers have figured out "cheap" and general type inference, I don't see the point anymore.
However, I use Python on a daily basis because I have no decent alternative for the libraries I use.