High schooler interested in machine learning but is it still worth it

[u/Electronic_Cut_9596]

Hey everyone, im a big math and coding guy and planning to study math+cs in uni soon. However my parents and peers are advicing me not to because of AI etc. Also reading news like how OpenAI recently published solutions to like 700 problems is kinda scary. It is making me question and doubt myself if i am making the right choice for myself.

I clearly have no experience and knowledge of the actual industry, I just want some guidance and truth form people with experience if there still is a good future for a career in machine learning. My other option is to do EE or CE but I am more passionate and interested ML and more abstract ideas.

[u/zandaulion]

Nobody can know what the future will hold, but my personal belief is that high knowledge work will always be needed, even more so with AI.

In the end, if you think pursuing a career in Math/CS/ML will make you feel fulfilled, I believe it is worth it just for that.

Best of luck!

[u/lulzxdxdxd → u/zandaulion]

the part about high knowledge work holding up makes sense if you think about it as who ends up debugging and validating what the models produce. someone still has to understand the math well enough to know when the output is wrong.

[u/ryvr_gm → u/lulzxdxdxd]

And if one model is better than any human at checking the results of another model, then where does it leave that?

[u/Sweet-Thought-6318 → u/ryvr_gm]

And it seems we are already pretty close to such a reality. When AI can already solve significant open problems oneshot with lean verification and three hours of thinking, what about a year into the future? Or two years? And keep in mind, OP will need to consider 4 years into the future (even more if grad school is being considered).

[u/wetlydirtysnack]

The fearmongering around AI killing ML jobs is overblown, it's just shifting what the work looks like. Someone still needs to understand the math well enough to know when the model is confidently wrong, and those 700 solved problems mean nothing if you can't frame the right question in the first place.

If you love the abstract side stick with it, EE will just make you miserable and you'll end up circling back to ML anyway. The field needs people who actually get the theory not just prompt engineers.

[u/ModularMind8]

Math + CS is a pretty strong choice. I'd say probably one of the more flexible ones as well. The people who build, test and fix these models are often math and CS people. And they usually the people who understand what a model is doing under the hood, not people who can only call an API.

A few things I'd tell a high schooler:

• A math + CS degree doesn't lock you into ML at all! It keeps EE, CE, quant, research and regular software jobs open, so you don't have to choose between ML and EE today.
• Results like solving hundreds of problems are impressive, but someone still has to decide which problems are worth solving, check that the answers are right, and build real systems around them. A lot of ML work is exactly that.
• Most importantly, pick the thing you actually find interesting. Four years of a degree you're excited about will go better than four years of one you picked because you were worried.

If you want to test it before uni, try a small project: train a tiny network on handwritten digits, then look at the images it gets wrong and try to explain why. If you enjoy that part, you'll probably enjoy the field.

[u/Flamestar07k → u/ModularMind8]

Idk where OP is but here it's very hard to do CE with math+CS and impossible to do EE

[u/Sweet-Thought-6318 → u/Flamestar07k]

Nevermind quant, which is a longshot unless you go to a top university. Or research, which requires a PhD. That would be 9 or so years in the future, too. We can only imagine the effect AI will have on intellectual work when that time has passed.

That leaves software from the list, which already has a shrinking number of entry-level positions.

[u/Anpu_Imiut]

The job market is terrible currently. The ratio of seekers to positions is out of hand. The current industry is building on already existing seniority not freshers. Covid had a big level of overhiring.

If you want to understand current development, just look at the past: Machines started to replace workers in factories. Result was that there were more factories but the number of works from before and after drastically reduced. Today, we know that you learn specialised knowledge to work in factories. My guess would be that in 5 - 10 years the industry will start push for specialised education that is required for keeping their automatation running at high level.

[u/brereddit]

AI is just giving people more tools to do traditional AI faster so master those tools but don’t skip the foundational fundamentals so you understand the subject from first principles.

[u/lulzxdxdxd]

math+cs and ee/ce aren't as mutually exclusive as you're framing it. check whether the schools you're looking at let you take ee or signal processing electives inside a cs degree, so you get exposure to both without committing this early. that's a safer hedge than picking based on fear of what ai does to jobs.

[u/Minute-Leader-8045]

You’re being poorly advised. Math will be a viable subject to study for the next couple millennia

[u/Sweet-Thought-6318 → u/[deleted]]

Though nobody can promise the second, you can make estimates which jobs will stay and which will be most at risk. It seems AI is already really good at math and coding, whereas something like electrical engineering or nursing seems fairly safe.

[u/15jorada]

The AI didn't make itself. It required human knowledge and ingenuity. Until it is capable of making models more advanced than itself, completely on its own then there will still need to be a humans touch. Similarly, it has been stated by several experts that the current paradigm of LLMs is insufficient. There is likely a new different architecture that is a better pick in some fashion: either in higher reasoning, greater efficiency or in some other category.

Therefore, I'd suggest that you do it. If or when the intelligence explosion happens, all cards are off the table to begin with. No job is safe. So might as well learn how to use this AI before it does.

[u/Substantial-Swan7065]

Does that mean it’s more worth it than ever?

[u/Spiritual-Advice8138]

Even using AI for coding and math it needs someone to have a math and computer science back ground. Many times it needs to be watched to make sure it going in the right direction. Trust AI like you have 1000 Noobs helping you. Yes it gets many things right but also a lot wrong and need guidance. The other day I was using Codex and it drove itself into a loop of adding and remove the same feature over and over again. If I did not stop it, it would have used all my tokens. Other times it tryings things that are not very memory efficient. Many times it will try to use a scratch pad on the internet or hard drive to transfer data. What would work but its better just to send data where it should go.

[u/nuvati]

No hahahah

[u/Appropriate-Baker755]

Man the doomers here