Edouard Harris @harris_edouard Twitter profile

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

Here's what we’ve been working on for over a year: The first US government-commissioned assessment of catastrophic national security risks from AI — including systems on the path to AGI. TLDR: Things are worse than we thought. And nobody’s in control.

Billy Perrigo

@billyperrigo

5 months

🚨Exclusive: a report commissioned by the U.S. government says advanced AI could pose an "extinction-level threat to the human species" and calls for urgent, sweeping new regulations

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Most understated resume I've ever seen: One of our mentees worked at a startup matching patients to doctors. He wrote an NLP pipeline to map 500,000 medical terms to search keywords. Startup used it to grow from $0 to $100M revenue on SEO/SEM. He literally unicorned a company.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Our company mentors data scientists for free until they're hired. Here's what we've been seeing in the data science job market in the past month.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

4/ First off, inside one lab there’s apparently a running joke that their security is so bad that they’re doing more to accelerate the AI capabilities of US adversaries, than the adversaries themselves are. Truly crazy. But this is where we’re at.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

5/ In December we quietly polled a handful of frontier AI researchers and asked them: What’s the chance we end up on a path to a catastrophic AI outcome, *during the year 2024?* We expected <1%. But no: Lowest we got was 4%. Highest: up to 20%. That's a wake-up call.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

9/ We visit one frontier AI lab. An executive there tells us, “we really wish $COMPETITOR wouldn’t race so hard.” A few weeks later, we speak to $COMPETITOR. And they tell us the same thing about the first lab.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

@BrianNorgard A/B testing is like autopilot for product: it might keep you in the air, but it won't get you off the ground.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

1 year

@paulg For what it's worth, I think Scott Alexander handily debunked this implied conclusion back in 2016.

Reverse Voxsplaining: Prison and Mental Illness

I. German Lopez of Vox writes that “America’s criminal justice system has in many ways become a substitute for the US’ largely gutted mental health system”. He says that sta…

slatestarcodex.com

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

To get hired as a data scientist in 2018, you built a project. To get hired as a data scientist in 2020, you build a product. Sure, standards have risen - but today's tools also make it possible to build so much more. New era.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

10/ In other words, the labs are locked in a race that they can’t escape. The AI lab execs still act like they’re running things. But the truth is, the race is running them.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

@mckaywrigley This, too, shall pass.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

6/ One researcher said he was concerned that if $MODEL was ever open-sourced, that would be “horribly bad”, because the model was so potentially good at persuasion that it could “break democracy” if it was weaponized. Still expects it to happen, within 18-36 months.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

7/ Another frontier AI researcher says: “It’s insane that we’re scaling without having a good way of telling if a model can do dangerous things or not.” Sure seems like it.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Underreported: Data Engineers are now in higher demand than Data Scientists (on a jobs-per-applicant basis). Combination of easier out-of-box DS + cos realizing model maintenance doesn't happen on its own. If you know infra tools (AWS / Spark / etc.), you're at an advantage.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

The deeper I dig, the more I suspect that 90%+ of the most valuable people are going totally unrecognized. Usually it's potential and opportunity. But far too often, it's that their very real past achievements simply aren't being explained very well.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Today in tech hiring: I give you a job post that asks for 12 years' experience, in a 6-year-old technology.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Story time. SharpestMinds has a lot of hiring partners (>200). Today I'm going to talk about one of them. Let's call them Moonshot Labs. Moonshot Labs does cutting-edge AI research. Moonshot Labs also does something very special.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

@BlindJoeDef @Alicia_Smith19 Exponential growth will always seem insignificant until it suddenly doesn't.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Universities are suddenly competing with 1) Udemy & Masterclass on learning content 2) Netflix on student experience 3) Facebook / Whatsapp / Slack etc. on community 4) Online mentorship programs on 1-to-1 support Their biggest differentiator: they charge 100X more.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

2 years

@eigenrobot In the 90s, the US National Nuclear Security Administration realized it had forgotten how to manufacture "fogbank", a key component of the warheads that make up America's strategic nuclear arsenal.

Fogbank - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

8/ Does this mean the AI labs *are* insane? No. In fact many of them *want* to do the right thing. But it’s like I said: nobody’s in control. Here’s what I mean:

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

"What's the hardest technical problem you've ever solved, and how exactly did you solve it?” — The only question Elon Musk asks in technical interviews (Source: Elon personally interviewed one of our mentors for a job at Tesla)

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

1/ We started this work with concerns, but no preconceptions. We knew there were solid technical reasons that AI could eventually pose catastrophic risks. But we went in looking for reasons to change our minds. We found the opposite.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

15/ The past 13 months have been one of the wildest experiences of our lives. We flew to London, DC, San Francisco. We met researchers in bars and were told astonishing things in whispers over drinks. We had engineers slipping us notes, desperate to get their stories out.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

13/ And we consolidated everything into a first-of-its-kind Action Plan: a set of recs for a US-driven initiative to improve AI safety and security, on the path to AGI. To our knowledge this is the most extensive, deeply researched, and thorough plan of its type in existence.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Data science job market status: everyone is frantically hiring again. I've got back-to-back "help me negotiate my job offer" calls lined up with mentees. Salary levels are also looking higher than before COVID. Still compiling data here, but the signs are intriguing.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

16/ We can’t thank enough the over 200 individual who spoke to us, some of whom took significant risks in doing so.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

2/ Our overriding goal was to get to the truth. To do that, we had to do more than just speak to policy and leadership at the AI labs. We also connected with individual technical researchers, many of whom are way more concerned than their labs let on in public.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Something I wish I'd realized 3 years ago: When you ask for advice from someone, it's 100X more effective if you craft your question to get at their raw data. Bad: How do you think I should do X? Good: What was the experience you've had that taught you the most about X?

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

If you've been working on a problem for a long time, the insights you have on it won't feel impressive to you. But they might feel very impressive to an outsider. It's worth showing your work to others. You often discover you were further ahead than you thought.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Another SM student got hired yesterday. He 1 Dropped out of school 2 Joined SharpestMinds 3 Found a mentor 4 Built a fullstack deep learning model for audio 5 Connected to our hiring network 6 Got hired by a YC company in SF ...all in the space of 3 months. He's 19.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

3/ Many of these folks came forward on condition of anonymity to share stories. Let me tell you some of the most insane stuff we learned.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

6 years

Been catching up on @naval 's tweets over the last few days which got me thinking about Proof of Work and everywhere it shows up *outside* crypto. Turns out it shows up a lot. The more you think about, it the more places you notice it. Tweetstorm 👇

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

12/ Because along with frontier AI researchers, we spoke to over a hundred of the US government’s top experts in WMD risk, supply chains, nonproliferation policy, defense, and other critical national security areas.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

3 months

@ja3k_ Cool. They transferred your luggage correctly too I assume?

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Just got asked a great question via DM just now. Paraphrasing: "I'm trying to get hired as a data scientist with no experience. I know my next step is to build a data science project, but I have no idea what to do. How do I pick a good project to work on?" Here's the answer: 👇

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

We need AI to keep delivering its amazing benefits. And there are ways to do that while keeping the risks in check. We'll get it done.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

@ProfNoahGian @billyperrigo But we aren't EAs and we aren't funded by anyone. The Action Plan even says this in a funding disclosure.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

14/ You can get a copy of the full Action Plan and check out our summaries of its recommendations. Link in bio.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Just heard from one of our earliest mentees this morning. She - Got hired 14 months ago - Paid off her ISA 2 months ago, and - Got hired again 1 month ago. First job: Junior NLP Eng at small startup. Second job: Senior Data Scientist at major bank. Her salary has gone up 2X.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

17/ The concerns about AI here are real and major, and the technology is advancing incredibly fast. But there *is* a solution. And we’re looking forward to building the coalitions needed to make it happen.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Just got an email from a mentee who was hired a year ago. He's trying to decide between a $200k+ salary on the one hand, and meaningful equity in a soon-to-be-Series B startup on the other. Breaking in is hard. But once you're in, the doors are open.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

11/ Sounds bad. So what can we do? Well that’s where the last part of our assessment comes in: the Action Plan.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

The line he had in his resume about this incredible achievement was something like: "Created data dictionary of biomedical terminology (500K clinical terms) derived from the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus." You can't make this stuff up.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

2 years

@liron @helium @a16z I think about this all the time

Brian Chesky

@bchesky

3 years

@levie That’s a great idea. Let’s financially incentive early adopters so we never know when we get to product-market fit. The current way is just too easy

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Just had a call with a mentee to help negotiate salary in a job offer. She: 1) Learned Python <1 yr ago 2) Went through SM with a great mentor 3) Walked up to AWS booth at a career fair 4) Got *immediately* sent to onsite, skipping phone screen 5) Job offer 48 hrs later Insane

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Some job posts inspire confidence in the company posting them. Others ask for 8 years' experience in a 5-year-old technology.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

We've just had the first AI research paper submitted to a major journal by a SharpestMinds student. Groundbreaking result in graph neural nets. All from work during his mentorship.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

6 years

@paulg In the very long run, startups face the same alternatives Batman does: you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Our mentors constantly post jobs at their companies to the #jobs channel in our internal Slack. And about 50% of the time, they add a note saying: "If you want to apply, just DM me. Don't bother applying through our website. HR will just screen you out." ...hiring is broken

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Feels like people are underestimating Toronto as a tech hub It's added tons of tech jobs, and there's a "random encounter" factor too Just in the last week, I've run into - Geoff Hinton at a coffee shop - Uber's head of AI strategy at a bar - Vitalik Buterin at a burrito joint

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

A year ago we set a crazy stretch goal: get enough mentees hired during 2019 to secure $500,000 worth of payments for mentors. At the time, this seemed hilariously impossible. Just finished doing the math: Our actual total was $499,919. We came up short... by $81. (0.016%)

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Why do I think small teams are the future? By the end of its first full year, SharpestMinds will have generated - $7 million+ in salary increases for its mentees - Half a million+ dollars in payments for its mentors Our core team is N = 3. And, I still had time to tweet this.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Just caught up with a hired mentee who - Was a sound engineer before SM - Started working with a mentor from Oculus - Got hired in January - Is now a Lead Data Scientist running his own team Some folks just need a toehold - and once they've got one, they take off like a rocket.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Love looking at our mentees' career paths. Physiotherapist => Court Monitor => Data Analyst 2nd Year Undergrad => Senior MLE Stay-at-home Parent (10 yrs) => Data Engineer Sound Technician => Data Scientist It's never easy. But the right mentor can unlock some amazing potential.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

At a YC meetup last night, I mentioned SharpestMinds has been running at breakeven for the past couple of months. YC founder from the industry: "You guys might be the only profitable ISA company in the world right now." Hadn't thought of it this way, but it could well be true.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

SharpestMinds just passed another milestone: we've created $2 million in *salary increases* for our grads. The first million dollars felt like such a huge achievement. It took us seven months. The second million dollars took us 60 days.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

@ProfNoahGian @billyperrigo We obviously spoke to folks in the EA movement for this, just as we spoke to accelerationist organizations like Meta. The situation in the labs really is just that insane. Here are some of the stories we uncovered:

Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 months

Here's what we’ve been working on for over a year: The first US government-commissioned assessment of catastrophic national security risks from AI — including systems on the path to AGI. TLDR: Things are worse than we thought. And nobody’s in control.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

3 months

Having a good time in Austin

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Today I found out that one of our students cofounded a bartering marketplace that's done tens of millions of transactions and just raised a series A. He never told us. Until we reviewed his resume to give him tips, we had no idea. The best ones really are the most humble.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

If you're looking to get hired in your first job as a data scientist, you might want to watch this AMA with someone who did that successfully.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Interviews Are Broken, #7654 : Onboarded a mentor yesterday. He was algorithm champ in high school, won international competitions. Early career he aced job interviews because of years practicing puzzles. Company hired him, then discovered he didn't know how to use a database.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

@ESYudkowsky If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that "prematurely" is the only useful time you *can* sound an alarm about an exponential process.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

I've said this before, but it probably isn't worth your time to apply to job boards. Find the people behind the posting, and reach out to them instead. Our internal stats are clear: the hard path is actually easier.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

The @SharpestMindsAI Slack has become one of the best secret resources for data science jobs on the Internet. It's half DS mentors, half job hunters. The recipe for great questions, and incredible answers. Question for DS Twitter: should we publish a few of these conversations?

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

@Tired_Doctor1 @FayCortez @skathire In this context, sensitivity is *far* more relevant than specificity. Positive patients can be simply sent to secondary testing. But if true positives are correctly detected and this platform can scale, useful level of screening can be applied to factories, stores, etc.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Email from a hired mentee: "I am currently working on Covid19 data visualization and projections for [COMPANY], got a promotion to a leadership position 4 weeks on the job. I manage now 3 projects." Continued:

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

One of our mentors just told me he's been hired by a university, to help build their data science program. The reason they hired him: his track record of getting junior data scientists hired in the field. Incredible to see mentors' careers accelerate alongside their mentees.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

A mentee messaged me right after getting a 6-figure offer, saying she owed it all to her mentor. At the exact same time, her mentor messaged me saying the mentee did it all on her own, and he barely had to do anything. The best people are the most generous in giving credit.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Blown away by the job offers mentees have been getting lately. - One mentee got hired as a Quantum Data Scientist. (Yes, that is his actual job title.) - Another just got an offer to design the control system for a rover on a lunar mission for NASA. Both in the same week.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

6 years

@SharpestMindsAI is growing. Are you a data scientist or ML engineer interested in mentoring the next generation? If you are, you should DM me. We're building something for you.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Infrastructure is insanely cheap, Exhibit A: SharpestMinds will create over $7 million in new salaries for mentees in 2019. Yet the app we've used to accomplish this is running on a single Heroku instance. For seven dollars a month.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

3 years

Effective today, @jeremiecharris and I are stepping down from @SharpestMindsAI — the YC company we cofounded 4 years ago — and handing it over to our two earliest employees: the amazing @russ_poll and @alejandroxrd . Here's the full story. Thread:

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

A sequel. In the last 10 months, this guy 8 Got a raise + promotion at his job 9 Started coaching mentees on SM with his old mentor 10 Created an ML training course 11 Passed our mentor screening interview himself (!!) 12 Just started working with his own mentees He's still 19.

Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Another SM student got hired yesterday. He 1 Dropped out of school 2 Joined SharpestMinds 3 Found a mentor 4 Built a fullstack deep learning model for audio 5 Connected to our hiring network 6 Got hired by a YC company in SF ...all in the space of 3 months. He's 19.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

If you want to scrape a website's data for a personal project, you'll be fine 99% of the time if you do 2 things: 1) Visit the website's robots.txt page and comply with it. 2) Throttle your requests down to a speed of roughly "human with OCD".

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

If the USA had cut their student visa program 30 years ago, they wouldn't have a manned space program today.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

In the 2020s in startups, I'm bullish on: - Small teams (more Instagrams, WhatsApps) - Platforms (more Shopifys) - Niche funding models (more TinySeeds, Stripe Capitals) - Human-machine hybrids (more Atriums, Pilots) - Space travel (more SpaceXs, Relativities) What about you?

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

The deeper I dive into mentorship, the more I find that personalities are like blood types. There are universal donors, who get along with everyone There are universal acceptors, who don't (rare) And there are Type As + Bs, who get along with own type, but less with the other

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

Data science job market update, April edition. Compared to March, we saw: - No more rescinded job offers - Hiring *might* be up slightly (10-15%), but this could still be noise - Similar volume of salary cuts - Additional furloughs / layoffs in April, but fewer than in March

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

We've actually accumulated a pretty sizable dataset of salaries for data roles. Would folks be interested in a report on this? Can slice things up by geography, job title, etc.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

One of our most recent mentees 1) Moved to Canada from India last year 2) Did a 1-year Master's 3) Joined SM in April; and 4) Got hired by the forecasting team of a big grocery chain 5) In the middle of a pandemic. I don't know how they do it.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

One of our mentees just messaged me. He 1 Cold emailed a cloud compute company, 2 Negotiated with them, and 3 Got them to agree to give away free compute credits. Not just to him. To *all* our mentees. He even got us an official referral link. I had no clue he was doing this.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

10/ The good news: Pretty much every job is suddenly remote. Geographic barriers are gone. You can now apply to a much wider range of companies than before. 🌎

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

A dating app that you only pay for if you get married

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Something interesting happened last week to one of our students, @perryrjohnson . Gather round folks. Thread coming up. 👇

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

3/ Impact is very uneven. Companies that rely on foot traffic (e.g., fashion retailers) are hit hard, freezing hiring, doing layoffs. B2B SaaS companies like Twilio and Airtable are mostly hiring normally. Remote work enablers like Slack and Zoom are accelerating recruitment.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

My favourite story of the week so far: 1) One of our students has a day job selling garden hoses 2) His boss finds out he's been doing a mentorship with SharpestMinds 3) His boss tells his boss's boss 4) His boss's boss offers him a job on the hose manufacturer's DS team

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

I just onboarded a mentor who got his start working at Geoff Hinton's lab in 2012. His first task there was to label the training data for a new kind of multilayer neural network. They called it AlexNet. That paper's now been cited nearly 60,000 times. A piece of history.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

8/ On interviews: You'll often be interviewed over Zoom. You should be aware that Zoom has a setting that tells the meeting organizer what's on your screen. Assume by default that interviewers will be using this.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Last week, one of our best mentees got two ML job offers on the same day. Literally the day before that, he'd run out of money and accepted a job at Arby's. Needless to say, he just quit Arby's.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

4 years

"A few months back, I could not get anyone to answer my phone and all I was thinking is that I was going homeless and losing my child." We're always delighted when a mentee gets hired. But sometimes, we literally jump for joy. Congratulations. ❤️😊

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

If you declare yourself an expert in X, that might just be enough to get people to give you their X problems. Then if you work desperately hard to help them, that might just be enough to turn you into a real expert in X. (One of many startup secrets.)

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

The most insane career transition I've ever seen on SharpestMinds is still the mentee who became a data scientist seven months ago. His career before that: Blacksmith.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

2 years

@patio11 And it gets *way* worse. This is just wild.

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Edouard Harris

@harris_edouard

5 years

Another mentee hired from our stipend program, where we pay mentees $1000 a month to go through SharpestMinds. My favorite part of this one: We got his LinkedIn so well-optimized that he never got the chance to apply anywhere. Just recruiter => interview => offer. Love those.

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