How to Be a Data Scientist

In episode 30 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Max Woolf.

Max Woolf (@minimaxir) is currently a Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco. Some work he’s done for BuzzFeed includes using StyleGAN to create AI-generated fake boyfriends and AI-generated art quizzes. In his free time, Max creates open source Python and R software on his GitHub. More recently, Max has been developing tooling for AI content generation, such as aitextgen for easy AI text generation.

Max’s projects are funded by his Patreon. If you have found anything on his website helpful, please help contribute!

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Sections:

(00:00) Intro

(01:20) Max’s Intro to Data Science and AI

(07:00) Software Engineering in Data Science, Max’s Perspectives

(09:00) Max’s Work at BuzzFeed

(23:10) Scaling, Inference, Large Models

(27:00) AI Content Generation

(30:45) Discourse About GPT-3

(34:30) AI Inventors

(38:35) Fun Projects and One-Offs: AI-generated Pokémon

(43:35) GPT-3-generated Discussion Topics

(46:30) Advice for Data Scientists

(48:10) BuzzFeed is Hiring :)

(48:20) Outro

Episode Links:

* Max’s Homepage

* Real-World Data Science