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François Chollet Profile picture
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5 Sep, 5 tweets, 1 min read
The tech industry's successive waves of fascination with get-rich-schemes powered by FOMO ("my idiot neighbor is getting rich, I have to get on this") actually serve a useful social purpose.

It compartmentalizes the negative impact of a certain kind of people/activity.
By default, the get-rich-quick folks go into what's hot. And you wouldn't want them to be founding AI startups promising the Singularity in 5 years, or biotech startups promising 100s of blood test results from a single finger prick. The fallout would be devastating.
Well-isolated tech grifter ecosystems work as a magnet that shields productive areas of research and product development from conmen, their deleterious mentality, and their long-term impact on public confidence.

If the 3rd AI winter never arrives, it's thanks to them.
So if an ambitious young person asks me whether they should go into crypto/NFTs or into AI, I will definitely tell them to go for crypto. (It used to happen a lot around 2017, not so much nowadays, which is great: AI is no longer "hot" in this way.)
(If you're hesitating between these two options, then the right option for you is not AI.)

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More from @fchollet

François Chollet Profile picture
14 Sep
I hear people saying "new housing is getting bought up as an investment vehicle, building more just helps the rich". Of course this is factually incorrect, but even more importantly, *in a world where enough housing gets built, housing is a depreciating asset, not an investment*.
When there is sufficiently supply, the price of a house / apartment goes down over time as it gets older (thus less attractive) and needs repairs. Eventually you have to tear it down and rebuild. Just like a factory. Or a car.
The price of housing only goes up because of artificial constraints that prevent supply from meeting demand. Housing works as an investment because we don't build fast enough / dense enough.
Read 6 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
6 Sep
People get scammed not so much because they can't analyze a scheme on an intellectual level, but because of their personality or emotional state. Smart are often *more likely* to get scammed, because they're more confident in their own judgement.

"Is it a scam?" A checklist.
1. Is there a real product/service involved, with an actual business/consumer need? What does the thing look like if you consider it from 1st principles, rather than from the lens of "smart people are into it, must be legit" or "even my neighbor is making money, must be legit"?
(scams will often try to hide their lack of practical foundations by saying they represent a "new paradigm", like "the internet in the 90s" -- everything that involves tech and hucksters must be like the internet, nevermind what the internet was actually useful for back then)
Read 7 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
3 Sep
Tweetorial: using mixed precision training with Keras models.

All you need to do is set the dtype policy via `keras.mixed_precision.set_global_policy()`.

Example: training an ImageNet model on Colab's TPUv2 (for free!) with bfloat16 mixed precision: colab.research.google.com/drive/1DPj1f_v… Image
Use "mixed_float16" as the policy value on GPU, and "mixed_bfloat16" on TPU.

You can also configure the dtype policy on a per-layer basis using the `dtype` layer constructor argument. Useful to keep some layers running in float32 when necessary!
In our example, we kept the data augmentation stage in float32 (created before setting the global policy) since it's meant to be run on CPU as part of the TF data pipeline. Image
Read 4 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
2 Sep
In the US, anti-abortion activism almost always leverages religious arguments -- because these are the only available arguments that would be socially acceptable -- to such an extent that many people actually believe that opposition to abortion is *motivated by religion*.
If you zoom out and look at more than just the US, you realize it's a misdirection. In every country, a certain kind of conservative men (and their allies, who may be women) staunchly oppose abortion rights -- no matter what their religion is, and whether they're religious or not
This is true independently of religion, culture, or even ethical foundations. Non-religious conservative men in Japan (a very patriarchal society) don't oppose abortion because they subscribe to christian ethics, or because they see "all life" as "sacred".
Read 4 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
2 Sep
It's often the case that you can't understand a thing well purely by accumulating knowledge about it -- you need the context that's provided by knowing *other* things as well.
For instance, you can't understand the US well if you only know the US. You need to look at how the US is similar to other countries, and how it is unique. You need to look at what there was before it existed -- where it came from. And so on.
And you can't understand English well if you only know English. You're also going to need French, Latin, etc. Context is everything
Read 4 tweets
François Chollet Profile picture
29 Aug
I see a lot of people puzzled by the fact that those who distrust the Covid vaccines are simultaneously enthusiastic about evidence-less "treatments" like HCQ or ivermectin, and coming up with convoluted theories to explain their possible thought process... but it's really simple
They just come across a lot of content (typically on Facebook) that says "vaccine are dangerous" and "ivermectin is a miracle cure".

That's it. That's how it works. People respond to the information they consume. Disinformation *works*. People read things online & believe them.
It's *not* about:
- What the CDC or FDA says
- What the government says
- What specific politicians say (though if a politician's statements are part of someone's information diet, then that will have an impact)
- Nostalgia towards the "good old days" of medical treatments
Read 6 tweets

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