Editor's note: In the interest of full transparency, Machine Learning Mastery is KDnuggets' sister site. The author was presented a copy of the book in question and granted full autonomy over their review. Most of the people I know can build, validate, and deploy machine learning models, but they don't know the basics of Python language. Their primary focus is on model architects instead of learning production-ready coding practices. These software engineering practices are necessary that will make you productive.

O'Reilly Media has a very good tradition of publishing concise and informative reports on various technical fields and subfields. They are intended for a reasonably wide audience, and usually contain a fair amount of useful and timely information. This short report on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Industry is one of the best such short reports that I have come across. It contains six different interviews with leading practitioners and industry experts who are developing advanced AI and ML products. It spans several different fields, some of which may come as a surprising places for ML to be applied to: legal, agricultural, educational, biological, etc. The interviews were insightful and, to me at least, eye-opening in terms of their content and far-reaching importance.

I have read several of these short ebooks from O'Reilly Media, and even though most of them are interesting and informative, this one is quite in a league of its own. This is due in part to the very fascinating topic it covers – advanced machine intelligence – but also in no small measure to the very high reputation of the contributors to the volume. The ebook consists of several short chapters, each one of which is an interview with a machine intelligence luminary. The topic covered in this volume are extremely cutting edge, and the right time to read this book is now. The field moves so rapidly, that most likely in just a year or two this whole ebook will be outdated.

Thanks to many impressive and rapid advances over the past few years, Artificial Intelligence has come into the spotlight – again. This could just be one of many false starts that this field has seen over the many years of its existence, or yet another Silicon Valley fad designed that startups are using to quickly raise money and gain market share, but there are many good reasons to believe much of the hype. Artificial Intelligence is probably here for good, and much of the technology and business in the upcoming years will be focused on the best ways of leveraging it. Judging by its title, this short ebook seems to provide a good explanation of what Artificial Intelligence is. Sadly, this is not the case.

The Future of Machine Intelligence is a collection of 10 interviews machine learning experts filed by David Beyer. The interviews explain exactly where we are with the state-of-the-art, the challenges to advanced machine learning, and some of the applications. In the last interview, Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google, describes sequence-to-sequence machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has been used to create descriptions of images, and could be used to summarize a 20 minute video into four descriptive sentences. In fact, this summarization ability isn't limited to graphical content: Perhaps five years is pushing it, but the notion of a machine reading a book for comprehension is not too distant. In a similar vein, we should expect to see machines that answer questions by learning from the data, rather than following given rule sets.