How much of AI depth should a generalist have ?
When it comes to AI and general programmer/Technology Architects ,one question I get asked is how much of AI internals they should know ?
The answers have few nuances . A budding programmer or framework aspirant these days has to be fullstack .Like it or not that is a job market reality . It takes good couple of years for someone to be respectably good full stack i.e Frontend -services- db .Interestingly cloud used to hyphenated in this equation as skill .Not now. Now the cloud is treated at par with your eclipse/intelliji . At the same time distributed computing has become the umbrella under which all job candidate now stand.
I would suggest that for generalist programmer technology architects AI will end up in same league as cloud .2023 is about time it a happens .
AI awareness becomes commodity skill like cloud
Detailing more on the path towards AI aware software engineer .
Most of the programmer community know elementary stats from graduation which can be brushed up to grasp what we call as machine learning .
It will also help so understand the piece on data engineering as for a generalist this is one common intersection point with AI (integration) .
However when it comes to deep learning it gets interesting .As such a the details of how a neural network works has no direct impact on daily work of a programmer/architect .But as a learning opportunity as well as future of programming frameworks we need to watch out .
The design of a tensor of tensor flow is a good proxy for designing your own interpreted language . The RNN,CNNs of the world are not only delight to study but they also are a possible direction as to where our big data or distributed computing might evolve .In fact there are already segments in AI community which are working on distributed learning (compute) framework .I see no reason as to why the deep learning community and traditional language-framework creators wont exchange notes soon and copy .
With that as a direction ,
Here is a simplified Architecture diagram of GPT of chatGPT fame. This one outlines the essential elements without dumbing down the huge amount of work .