I've met a few people who quit ML to go into crypto. But these people were either doing DL research (and hadn't written a paper in a while) or chaining protobufs all day long.
Many of my peers + people my age have gone into crypto. I don't have any strong evidence for this, but I think the pandemic forced my generation into career crises (i.e. is what I'm doing impactful?) early in their careers
So early, in fact, that many of us didn't have any problems we were super attached to & were looking for high-opportunity spaces. Crypto/web3 is everything we want -- the ability to be on the frontier of something, an influencer in a socially isolated time
People spend their 20s learning to develop meaningful relationships (e.g., find a partner, close friends). The pandemic really hurt us here. The only other thing we really had was our careers. In my own pandemic crisis I made my way to the PhD. I saw my friends go to crypto
A lot of well-established tech folks diss on web3 but I find it hard to believe they would not have done the same if they were new grads in this time & place. My generation is not dumb, we are just following the incentives laid out for us
It's silly to expect an ambitious single new grad w/o kids to take a remote 9-5 SWE job over the opportunities web3 presents. It is like expecting an ambitious ML PhD in 2015 to not do DL. Or a CS professor who does cool research to never start a company. Lol.
I guess my point is that although I don't understand web3 / think a lot of it is a Ponzi scheme, I understand there is a universe where I'd be working in web3. I feel lucky to have enough technical problems in ML that I believe are high-impact
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