Oh Hi Deep Learning, I Didn't See You There

It's been a while since I dabbled in machine learning. I have taken every single course I could about it in university - that was around 10 to 7 years ago. Before deep neural networks started achieving consistently impressive results on usually-SVM-dominated tasks.

Around 5 years ago, I co-founded an AI startup, trying to build tools which helped made sense of visual content on social media. We made use of cloud GPU machines, the tech we built was quite cool, but unfortunately we were not able to make the product thrive commercially.

Fast forward to now. It's 2020, and I have the feeling like deep learning has managed to sneak in all around me unseen. I started noticing successful and useful products which make good use of deep neural networks. Achieving results which would not have been possible before. Incredibly exciting developments around cloud offerings, hardware progress and new applications.

I have the feeling the industry is on fire. Everything is happening so fast and there is so much interesting new stuff coming up, it reminds me of how it felt to work with Kubernetes two years ago. Suddenly, initial interest becomes wider-spread adoption. You think that the progress before was impressive, but then the pace picks up even more. A very exciting time!

I'm starting this blog to keep track of my own journey, getting to know the once-familiar AI and ML landscape and seeing what I can contribute to it, having focused on DevOps, containers and Kubernetes for the past few years.

Cheers and thanks for reading!
Vladislav