What are senior ML practitioners reading this summer?

If you are tired to see yet another "how to prompt" book recommendation and looking for knowledge you can actually apply in your work or at least it will stimulate your imagination, check out the books below!

"Machine Learning System Design. With end-to-end examples" by Valerii Babushkin and Arseny Kravchenko (MEAP on manning, official release Sep'24)

Ability to think far beyond "jupyter notebook" in the ML-based application development is the main difference between junior and senior ML practitioner. Everyone knows about it, but only a few dare to write a book about it. Valerii and Arseny took up this challenge and covered very broad topic in just 300 pages. During the first part you might get an impression that the book is written by managers for managers. But bear with them and don't drop the book after reading just a few chapters! Parts after the first one are more interesting for hands-on people. And it never hurts to learn how to look at the things from the bird-view perspective 😉

"Machine Learning Q and AI. 30 Essential Questions and Answers on Machine Learning and AI" by Sebastian Raschka

Very unconventional format for a book about ML: 30 short chapters on various topics, from explanation of latent space and confidence intervals till self-attention and transformers. I would recommend this book to everyone, who feels stuck and not sure where to go next or what to study. It gives you pretty decent understanding of the most used concepts in 20s of XXI century. And might inspire you to go deeper in one or another topic. I also find the length of the chapters perfect for a short coffee break in a sunny street cafe.

"The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI" by Ray Kurzweil

If you need a break from all this technical staff, but still would like to read something about AI and our future, you will enjoy this book. Ray became famous as inventor and entrepreneur in pattern-recognition in 80s and 90s. And some people might remember him as the guy who was hired in 2012 "to bring natural language understanding to Google". Even Bill Gates suggests listen to Ray, when it comes to predicting future of AI. To avoid any spoilers, I won't tell you what Ray Kurzweil predicts for us. But it's my duty to alert you: the book is full of facts and philosophical thoughts and time might fly while you're reading it. So if you decide to do it on the beach, make sure you put decent amount of sunscreen 😎