Aw thanks :) I mostly trained as a theorist through undergrad, then when I started grad school I spent some time learning about ML and decided to do applied work at OpenAI. I feel like the methodologies are quite different but the underlying skills aren’t that different. Maybe the biggest deltas are that ML involves much more management of attention and jumping between things in order to be effective in practice, while theory is a bit more loaded on focusing on one line of reasoning for a long time and having some clever idea. But while those are important skills I don’t think they are the main things that you improve at by working in either area and aren’t really core.
I feel like in general there is a lot of transfer between doing well in different research areas, though unsurprisingly it’s less than 100% and I think I would be better at either domain if I’d just focused on it more. The main exception is that I feel like I’m a lot better at grounding out theory that is about ML, since I’ve had more experience and have more of a sense for what kinds of assumptions are reasonable in practice. And on the flip side I do think theory is similar to a lot of algorithm design/analysis questions that come up in ML (frankly it doesn’t seem like a central skill but I think there are big logistical benefits from being able to do the whole pipeline as one person).
Aw thanks :) I mostly trained as a theorist through undergrad, then when I started grad school I spent some time learning about ML and decided to do applied work at OpenAI. I feel like the methodologies are quite different but the underlying skills aren’t that different. Maybe the biggest deltas are that ML involves much more management of attention and jumping between things in order to be effective in practice, while theory is a bit more loaded on focusing on one line of reasoning for a long time and having some clever idea. But while those are important skills I don’t think they are the main things that you improve at by working in either area and aren’t really core.
I feel like in general there is a lot of transfer between doing well in different research areas, though unsurprisingly it’s less than 100% and I think I would be better at either domain if I’d just focused on it more. The main exception is that I feel like I’m a lot better at grounding out theory that is about ML, since I’ve had more experience and have more of a sense for what kinds of assumptions are reasonable in practice. And on the flip side I do think theory is similar to a lot of algorithm design/analysis questions that come up in ML (frankly it doesn’t seem like a central skill but I think there are big logistical benefits from being able to do the whole pipeline as one person).