Gwern's site feels like the "old web" in all the best ways to me. I think the writing would actually lose something if transposed into book form

"just" is always a weird modifier in these kinds of conversations. Most things can be reduced to "just" some basic operation(s). What is amazing is the complexity that emerges from those simple operations at scale.

Granted that emergent behaviors are important. The reason for injecting "just" is to counter the AI hype. Imagine if the headline read "With a nudge from linear algebra, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment". Dropping the word AI in there, in addition to boosting the articles SEO, will suggest to those with a casual interest that his must be a big deal, because "I've heard so much about how AI is solving <insert big problem here>"

Well, if you dive into data science and ML, you'll see it is much more than just a bit of linear algebra. Some topics (and as a data engineer, I am not an expert):

- Distributed computing

- Feature selection

- Budgeting / accounting of experimental design (these TPU clusters are not cheap)

- ML architecture

- Involvement of domain experts (multidisciplinary teams)

- Storage

The whole list is much longer, but just some topics to think about. For me the term "AI", although overly broad, come to mean the engineering and organisation needed to pull these kind of projects.

I think this a symptom of only the most moonshot-y getting associated with X in coverage.

Google Brain, for example, started at X. So did a bunch of Google's wearable tech, if I'm not mistaken.

In one sense, almost certainly. But in another sense, any plausible fix is easy compared to the current situation.

The sense I intended was that it may indeed be an easy fix, but second- third- etc- order effects may actually make us all worse off in ways we never considered.

I believe it is regionally accredited.