Janos Gabler

Just in time for @EuroSciPy!

# on shortification of "learning" There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients. Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn. I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero. So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn. And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

We have an exciting talk coming up tomorrow at 4pm CEST in the TransferLab seminar! Join us for an introduction to Reduced Order Modeling and how surrogate models can accelerate large-scale engineering workflows. More details below and here: transferlab.ai/seminar/2024/i…

Looking for some physics-enhanced machine learning insights this Thursday afternoon? 🧠 Join us for the upcoming TransferLab talk on "generalized quadratic embeddings for nonlinear dynamics".

As promised, here are a few more details about why we renamed estimagic to optimagic and what it means for users: tinyurl.com/optimagic-rena…

@lucabaggi_ @s3alfisc @optimagic @MensingerTim I would love to! Let's talk soon!

@JanosGabler @s3alfisc @optimagic @MensingerTim Totally! If you can travel, we'd love to feature you at PyData Milan's monthly meetups. We're not that big right now so not a lot of budget to sponsor guests, though.

My favorite talk this year! @optimagic is a wrapper library that provides a common API to around 60 opzimizers implemented in Python. Particularly enjoyed how much thought & effort the package authors (@JanosGabler & @MensingerTim) put into designing a user friendly API!

@lucabaggi_ @s3alfisc @optimagic @MensingerTim Yes, we renamed the package recently. Help us to spread the word about this!

@s3alfisc @optimagic @JanosGabler @MensingerTim Oh I remember it was called estimagic last year! They did a great tutorial. Too bad I didn't come this year, would've loved to meet.

@esc___ Thanks, I'll have a look!

Wow, I feel honored!

Currently @JanosGabler giving a talk on @optimagic.

@Apoorva__Lal @s3alfisc @EuroSciPy Hi Apoorva, sure! Always happy to get pointers like this!

@JanosGabler @s3alfisc @EuroSciPy Looks great. Any chance you'd be willing to add bindings to ensmallen? I consistently see 5-10x speedups relative to scipy in my bindings (not on pypi yet but will be once I get the github action build the wheels in an acceptable form for pypi) github.com/apoorvalal/pye…

Just in time for @EuroSciPy!

estimagic is now optimagic! 🎉✨ In addition to a new name, we have many new features.🚀 Stay tuned for updates in the next few days. 🔜📅

⚡️ Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs. The announcement: --- We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native. How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted). Our first product will be the world's obviously best AI course, LLM101n. This is an undergraduate-level class that guides the student through training their own AI, very similar to a smaller version of the AI Teaching Assistant itself. The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together. Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential. What would you like to learn? --- @EurekaLabsAI is the culmination of my passion in both AI and education over ~2 decades. My interest in education took me from YouTube tutorials on Rubik's cubes to starting CS231n at Stanford, to my more recent Zero-to-Hero AI series. While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI. All of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my "real job", so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time. It's still early days but I wanted to announce the company so that I can build publicly instead of keeping a secret that isn't. Outbound links with a bit more info in the reply!

JMP 🧵🎉 What drives maternal labor supply - a key factor for labor market inequalities? Gender role attitudes! We use reduced form and structural methods to show that they are of first-order importance, both directly and through the mediation of policies (w/ @MensingerTim)

@IngoIsphording Me too!

With many 🧩 dropping recently, a more complete picture is emerging of LLMs not as a chatbot, but the kernel process of a new Operating System. E.g. today it orchestrates: - Input & Output across modalities (text, audio, vision) - Code interpreter, ability to write & run programs - Browser / internet access - Embeddings database for files and internal memory storage & retrieval A lot of computing concepts carry over. Currently we have single-threaded execution running at ~10Hz (tok/s) and enjoy looking at the assembly-level execution traces stream by. Concepts from computer security carry over, with attacks, defenses and emerging vulnerabilities. I also like the nearest neighbor analogy of "Operating System" because the industry is starting to shape up similar: Windows, OS X, and Linux <-> GPT, PaLM, Claude, and Llama/Mistral(?:)). An OS comes with default apps but has an app store. Most apps can be adapted to multiple platforms. TLDR looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.

To see estimagic in action, check out my talk at @EuroSciPy youtu.be/5xYn0v1zEsY?si…

🎉 It's as simple to use as scipy.optimize 🚀 It provides a unified interface to algorithms from all major optimization packages in Python 🔬 Diagnostic tools help you find the best algorithm for your problem

Numerical optimization problems are often tackled by scientists and engineers who were never trained how to do it, don't really want to do it, and definitely don't want to read a book about it. If this describes you, you will love #estimagic!

My friend Zolisa is looking for a new job in the US. He has a very strong background in stats and (rare!) is also a very good developer. He’s been contributing to @AesaraDevs and related projects, and I have only good things to say about him. RT or DM 🙏 github.com/zoj613