this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
492 points (86.8% liked)
Technology
59641 readers
2685 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What do you do exactly in AI? I'm a software engineer interested in getting involved.
I work for Amazon as a software engineer, and primarily work on a mixture of LLM's and compositional models. I work mostly with scientists and legal entities to ensure that we are able to reduce our footprint of invalid data (i.e. anything that includes deleted customer data, anything that is blocked online, things that are blocked in specific countries, etc). It's basically data prep for training and evaluation, alongside in-model validation for specific patterns that indicate a model contains data it shouldn't have (and then releasing a model that doesn't have that data within a tight ETA).
It can be interesting at times, but the genuinely interesting work seems to happen on the science side of things. They do some cool stuff, but have their own battles to fight.
That sounds cool, I've had roles that were heavy on data cleansing, although never on something so interesting. What languages / frameworks are used for transforming the data, I understand if you can't go into too much detail.
I did wonder how much software engineers contribute in the field, it's the scientists doing the really interesting stuff when it comes to AI? Not surprisingly I guess 😂
I'm a full stack engineer, I was thinking of getting into contracting, now I'm not so sure, I don't know enough about AI's potential coding capabilities to know whether I should be concerned about job security in the short, or long term.
Getting involved in AI in some capacity seems like a smart move though...
We do a lot of orchestration of closed environments, so that we can access critical data without worry of leaks. We use Spark and Scala for most of our applications, with step functions and custom EC2 instances to host our environments. This way, we build verticals that can scale with the amount of data we process.
If I'm perfectly honest, I don't know how smart a move it is, considering our org just went through layoffs. We're popular right now, but who knows how long for.
It can be interesting at times, but to be honest if I were really interested in it, I would go back and get my PhD so I could actually contribute. Sometimes, it feels like SWE's are support roles, and science managers only really care that we are unblocking scientists from their work. They rarely give a shit if we release anything cool.