I agree with what antirez said, but I want to address the fallacy: The fact that he's an authority in C doesn't make him a priori more likely to know a lot about ML.
I agree with you, stavros. There is no transfer between C coding and ML topics. However the original question is a bit more in the business side IMHO. Anyway: I've some experience with machine learning: 20 years ago I wrote (my first neural network)[https://github.com/antirez/nn-2003] and since then I always stayed in the loop. Not for work, as I specialized in system programming, but for personal research I played with NN images compression, NLP tasks and convnets. In more recent times I use pytorch for my stuff, LLM fine-tuning and I'm a "local LLMs" enthusiast. I speculated a lot about AI, and wrote a novel about this topic. So while the question was more in the business side, I have some competence in the general field of ML. More than anything else I believe that all this is so new and fast-moving that there are many unknown unknowns, so indeed what I, you or others are saying are mere speculations. However to speculate is useful in this time, even more than before, because LLMs are a bit of a black box for the most part, so using only "known" things we can't go much far in our reasoning. We can understand embeddings, attention, how this networks are trained and fine tuned, and yet the inner workings are a bit of a magic thing.
To be clear, I'm not saying antirez is or isn't good at ML, I'm saying C/systems design/etc experience doesn't automatically make someone good at ML. I'm not trying to argue, I'm just discussing.
Oh, it's not a big deal. I just hate talking about the chap in front of him. I like to give compliments specifically, and be vague about less-than-complimentary things.
The thing is, even the ML people are not exactly sure what's going on, under the hood. It's a very new field, with a ton of "Here, there be dragonnes" stuff. I feel that folks with a good grasp of long-term architectural experience, are a good bet; even if their experience is not precisely on topic.
That's true, but I see my friend who's an ML researcher, and his grasp of LLMs is an order of magnitude better than mine. Granted, when it comes to making a product out of it, I'm in a much better position, but for specific knowledge about how they work, their capabilities, etc, there's no contest.
This is not a fallacy, we are engaging in informal reasoning, and contra your claim the fact that he is an authority in C does make it more likely he knows a lot about ML than the typical person.
