Like any rapidly growing scientific(-ish) field that captures the public’s imagination, ML is susceptible to its fair share of snake oil salesmen and dubious claims of magical achievements. This issue really crystallized for me with the Siraj Raval scandal last year. Raval is a YouTube personality and self-proclaimed data scientist who makes “Artificial Intelligence education” videos for nearly 700,000 subscribers. His work has been praised and retweeted by Elon Musk and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and his list of followers on Twitter used to include the likes of Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Dean, Ian Goodfellow and many other credible, well-known personalities not just in ML but in tech broadly. While his videos have always had that unmistakable YouTube clickbait-ness to them, Raval’s videos were entertaining and relatively informative for beginners (except for predicting stock prices with 10 lines of Keras code, please don’t do that). All was going well until September 2019, when a
Issue #2: AI snake oil
Issue #2: AI snake oil
Issue #2: AI snake oil
Like any rapidly growing scientific(-ish) field that captures the public’s imagination, ML is susceptible to its fair share of snake oil salesmen and dubious claims of magical achievements. This issue really crystallized for me with the Siraj Raval scandal last year. Raval is a YouTube personality and self-proclaimed data scientist who makes “Artificial Intelligence education” videos for nearly 700,000 subscribers. His work has been praised and retweeted by Elon Musk and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and his list of followers on Twitter used to include the likes of Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Dean, Ian Goodfellow and many other credible, well-known personalities not just in ML but in tech broadly. While his videos have always had that unmistakable YouTube clickbait-ness to them, Raval’s videos were entertaining and relatively informative for beginners (except for predicting stock prices with 10 lines of Keras code, please don’t do that). All was going well until September 2019, when a