I started my PhD in NLP a year or so before the advent of Transformers, and finished it just as ChatGPT was unveiled (literally defended a week before). Halfway through, I felt the sudden acceleration of NLP, where there was so much everywhere all at once. Before, knowing one's domain, and the state-of-the-art GCN, CNN or Bert architectures, was enough.
Since, I've been working in a semi-related area (computer assisted humanities) as a data engineer/software developer/ML engineer (it's a small team so many hats). Not much in terms of latest news, so I tried recently to get up to speed with the recent developments.
But there are so many ! Everywhere. Even just in NLP, not considering all the other fields such as reinforcement learning, computer vision, all the fundamentals of ML etc. It is damn near impossible to gather an in-depth understanding of a model as they are so complex, and numerous. All of them are built on top of other ones, so you also need to read up on those to understand anything. I follow some people on LinkedIn who just give new names every week or so. Going to look for papers in top conferences is also daunting as there is no guarantee that a paper with an award will translate to an actual system, while companies churn out new architectures without the research paper/methodology being made public. It's overwhelming.
So I guess my question is two fold : how does one get up to speed after a year of not being too much in the field ? And how does one keep up after that ?
Honestly, I mostly just follow hugging face's blog and articles. I know there are some latest fancy attention improvements, alternatives for RLHF, GPU whatever optimization, etc, but I'm not going to implement those myself. If it's not in hugging face's ecosystem, then I most likely wouldn't use it in my daily work/production code anyway.
Hugging face is for sure a godsend, even though I'm still at a semi-loss with their API. It changed so much, and there is so much more now that it has become a little confusing. Nothing a little work can't fix ! But that raises the question to me : how do these people manage to get out every model so fast ?
Yeah, reading all their latest releases is already taking me a lot of time so I just mostly stop there. They also don't have a lot of documentations for their latest stuffs, so it takes a bit time to figure things out. I think their packages will settle down to a more stable state after a year or two, after the NLP hype cooldowns a bit.