This interview is part of the Learnetto Interview Series with interesting experts and teachers from all walks of life.
Please introduce yourself - who are you and what do you do?
I am Harish Garg and I am a Founder, Software Developer and a Writer.
I have 20+ years of experience in the software field, out of which 11 years I spent working for a company called McAfee, Inc.
I have been running my own Software Consultancy since 2015, consulting clients for projects related to Web Development, Data Science & Growth Marketing. I have also written multiple books and created Video courses on the topics of Data Science, Machine Learning, programming with Python, etc.
How did you get interested in ML/AI?
When I started my software entrepreneurship journey, one of my clients wanted me to set up a Machine Learning pipeline for them. That led me to do some research and self-learning in the field.
Since I was already programming with Python for years, that was the language I chose for Machine Learning.
Python has a rich ecosystem of libraries for Data Science and Machine Learning like numpy, pandas Scikit-Learn, Jupyter, etc. As part of this learning, I also joined and graduated from Udacity’s Data Science Track.
What challenges have you noticed with learning ML/AI?
Finding the right learning resources for what you are trying to learn. There is a lot of confusion, especially for new people coming in on what constitutes Data Analysis/ Science and Machine Learning/ Deep learning.
Lack of Statistical fundamentals and at least some level of expertise in a programming language like Python is a limiting factor.
However, you don’t need to be an expert at Machine Learning to be able to use AI models like OpenAI to build AI-enabled Apps.
You just need to bring your prior product development skills and know how to integrate with 3rd party APIs.
What new opportunities do you see with modern ML/AI?
Biggest opportunity is the democratization of the ability to create AI enabled end-user products. Till a couple of years back, using ML/AI in your product meant training gigantic models with millions and currently billions of parameters, which frankly is not possible for 99% of the people and companies.
You could build and train small models but they were not much useful in a end user product. With the availability of GPT-3 as an API for example in the text generation and classification field, a single developer can build apps without having the expertise or the computing resources to train expensive AI models.
This opens up building AI enabled apps to a huge range of creators. We will see a huge innovation in this area. I expect other companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook also launching their own GPT-3 like APIs in near future.
What's OpenAI/GPT-3?
GPT-3 is a autoregressive language model trained with 175 billion parameters. It’s created by OpenAI, a AI company that started as a non-profit founded by Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceX, Sam Altman from YC and others. GPT-3 is a few-shot learner model.
What makes OpenAI/GPT-3 special?
Being a few-shot learner model, means given only a few examples, GPT-3 will respond to text prompts with text completion or classification very close to the expected result from a Human. This makes it very useful to use in the real world without requiring a lot of training data.
OpenAI has made it easier by hosting the models themselves and exposing the prompt and the output part through a simple API.
What got you interested in teaching?
I have always been teaching in one form or the other. I tutored juniors during my college days. I was very much part of bringing new hires up to speed in my corporate jobs.
Then it turned into a major consulting project for a publishing client of mine who asked me to create multiple Video Courses and books for them on the topics of Data Science, Machine Learning, Blockchain, etc.
Tell us about your upcoming book.
Coming from both product development and Machine Learning background, I see a huge potential in technologies like OpenAI’s GPT-3.
Their decision to make it available as an API makes it very easy for all for product builders to integrate AI in their apps. Both established companies and startups are following this space very closely and want to integrate AI in their products or looking to create new apps.
With my book Definite Guide to building products with OpenAI, I am putting together a resource that should help Product Builders, Product Managers, Founders and other stakeholders understand the OpenAI GPT-3 API.
This book aims to make it easy for them to understand and then decide how to go about integrating with OpenAI GPT-3 API.
Where can people connect with you and follow all your work?
My one central home on the internet is my website - https://harishgarg.com. I am also quite active on Twitter (@harishkgarg). Best ways to reach me is either via email (it’s on my website) or via DM on Twitter.
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