· 3 min read

Advice for those who want to learn Deep Learning

or Machine Learning

I do get questions once or twice a month in my friend circle of someone who is thinking of starting to learn Machine Learning or Deep Learning.

I am not an expert​. Nor do I have a DL job. But I do know enough that I can work with a DL team and build something over a few months.

Hopefully, this answers all of your questions.


Don’t learn Machine Learning

You don’t need to know ML before learning DL.

  • It’s dumb.
  • It is getting rapidly replaced by DL. Therefore, turning irrelevant.

Lot of times people build a complex hand made ML solution just to get little bit higher metrics. In the long run a simple DL model be better.

Deep Learning gets easier as more time passes.

Allow your mind to adjust to the counter-intuitiveness. For me, it took months to adjust.

Get comfortable not knowing a lot of stuff.

You might never need to do calculus but hand yourself. We have computers in the 21st century.

Knowing where to use it and what it does is enough.

Material beats the Method.

Learn from the latest courses and use the latest tools.

This is a fast-changing field. 2-year-old stuff is mostly irrelevant.

It is probably good to mix your learning from multiple sources.

Recommended Course:

Recommended next read: How not to do Fast.ai (or any ML MOOC)

Learn a framework well

This is useful when you are not following a tutorial.

I learned PyTorch.

Be hands-on from Day One

Learned gradient descent today??? Nice! Open a Jupyter notebook and code the simplest gradient descent you could think of.

Reading/Watching videos matters less. Coding is the skill you are trying to develop.

Don’t get intimidated from people on the internet.

Most people in DL space are genuinely nice. But some you will find just crank out project after project by stealing other people’s code and never giving them credits.

Don’t get intimidated by them. Fame comes and bites them in the ass!

Know that those who are genuinely nice have spent a lot of time working on it.

Jobs

This is a hard one. DL is something I really really loved and I wanted to do it full-time.

But looking at the job market here in Mumbai, India, a lot of companies which say they are doing DL and often just don’t.

Or they do enough to get investors and job candidates. Most don’t ship anything. I can think of none actually.

Finding something difficult??

For questions or counter related to this post, write them in the comments below.


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