The Future Stack AI Newsletter #3
Welcome to the third edition of the newsletter that brings Australians the latest developments in AI from all over the world.
⚡New this week
A conference that you absolutely cannot miss!
AI marketplaces and more!
Burgeoning industries in Australia and how AI is helping.
💗Mental Health Check-in
8th September is “R U OK?” day in Australia. R U OK is a suicide prevention charity and this day is to remind and encourage people to reach out. Check in with yourself and spread the love!
🌍AI in the world
NVIDIA GTC is THE conference for developers working in AI and the metaverse
The NVIDIA GTC conference is happening soon (19-22 September) and the best part is that it’s fully online (it’s also free!). There are going to be sessions from multiple industries and technologies and to be honest, the whole thing is a bit overwhelming. So, I am listing a few topics that I personally am excited about and you can select them from the catalog here.
3D Design Collaboration (A panel from NVIDIA, Pixar, Adobe, Unity, Autodesk, and others on Universal Scene Description as the foundations of the Metaverse, A talk from a senior art director at NVIDIA on photoreal virtual worlds)
AI Strategy for Business Leaders (Check out the NVIDIA Inception Global Startup Showcase)
World Simulation and Digital Twins (A talk by NVIDIA on building digital twins using 3D data, Another talk from NVIDIA on building simulation-ready assets to build physical accurate digital worlds)
As you can see, NVIDIA is betting big on the metaverse. Creating realistic worlds and digital twins is a huge undertaking. The vision of NVIDIA Omniverse is to create Earth 2.0 with very high fidelity. This technology will have some great applications, but definitely some unintended consequences. Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
You are leaving money on the table if your models are not on an AI Marketplace
Okay, maybe that is an exaggeration. But, seriously, if you as an individual have developed an AI model that performs well on a specific use case and you want to monetize it, AI marketplaces are the way to go.
AI marketplaces operate on a business model of offering AI as a Service to companies looking to perform very specific tasks and get some early wins from their data. To use these models, companies pay some fee and the developer of these models gets compensated for her effort. These places are like the Apple Store but for AI engineers.
Imagine you are a company looking to get some intelligence out of your data and use that to make some business decisions. If you are a tech company, chances are that you already have software developers. But, in order to do some AI, you might need to hire data scientists and then some ML engineers to put that into production. But someone somewhere else in your industry might already have an AI model for your use case. AI marketplaces provide you with industry-specific production-ready models to quickly and cheaply try if a particular use case can be improved using AI. This also helps with the democratization of AI as now everyone who can write code and has money can access these production-ready models.
There are many marketplaces that have cropped up in the last year. In 2021, there were very few. One such AI marketplace is SingularityNET. I mention them because they are not just a marketplace, they are a decentralized open market and network for AIs. They are combining the concept of marketplaces with blockchain. They have written a whitepaper on this and I would love to connect to someone whom I can discuss and read it in detail with.
🦘AI in Australia
Australia is experiencing growth in many sectors but the most important ones are advanced manufacturing, agriculture forestry and fishing, climate and energy sector, and, defence and space.
This week let’s look at the Australian space industry and how that creates jobs in the AI sector.
The global space industry is going to be $1 trillion USD by 2040, and Australia wants a piece of that. The Australian Space Agency (ASA) was founded on the 1st of July 2018. It is at a very nascent stage. But that does not mean that not much is happening. In fact, Australia has historically been a leader in remote sensing data analysis for various downstream industries (Regrow, Spiral Blue), satellite data calibration, and validation (Latitudo 40, Arlula,), and employs around 10,000 people. Australia is home to innovations like high throughput phased array technologies (QuasarSat), where basically the antenna can talk to multiple satellites.
To make a mark in the global space arena, Australia is focusing on areas like Earth Observation, Robotics, automation, communication, and space object tracking, as well as space life sciences.
In order to achieve these objectives, Australia needs cross-cutting skills in electronics, mechanical engineering, AI, advanced manufacturing, robotics, big data analytics, and many other fields that I don’t even know about. This document highlights what Australian Space Industry needs to achieve its potential - skilled professionals.
P.S. If you belong to any one of these categories or have these skills, moving to Australia could be a good idea😉. The ASA is estimating the creation of 20,000 more jobs over the next 6-7 years.
🔧Upskilling
This week I am not going to point you to any course or book to get better at Machine Learning. Instead, I will point you to the most important framework you can use to ask the right questions and learn from people who are ahead of you on the path you want to take.
Asking lots of questions is probably the biggest career differentiator I have stumbled upon. I have also asked a lot of successful people what made them top-notch in their respective careers, and guess what - 70% of them have replied that their curiosity has made all the difference.
👩💻 About me
I am an ML engineer in Canberra and my most intense obsession is to help companies and individuals become competitive by investing in data and AI. Subscribe to my newsletter if you have similar ideas on making a dent in the universe. All the content that I create is free and I intend to keep it so!
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