Meet your new colleague – the ML Admin, who tames LLMs so they're ready to rock

Some organizations have started hiring for a new tech job: The Machine Learning Administrator – aka the “ML admin”. “It’s a new persona, but not a well-known persona,” Debbo Dutta, Nutanix’s Chief AI Officer told The Register at last week’s Next conference. “The ML admin articulates, designs, plans, executes, and monitors the …

[Pete 2]

Bingo!

> The ML admin articulates, designs, plans, executes, and monitors the emergent large language model lifecycle

Any more buzzwords we could stuff into this sentence?

I can see the need for an MLA, just as I understand the need for a DBA, network admin and all the other specialised roles. The question that comes to mind is why this would have to be a person. Isn't the entity best placed to monitor LLMs and all the rest of it just another LLM.

In fact I can foresee an entire shadow organisation appearing within IT companies. One that is made up entirely of AIs, agents, MLAs and a few yet-to-be-created roles in AI management. I just wonder how much of their time will be spent in pointless machine to machine meetings

That should slow 'em down to the point of uselessness.

[Mentat74]

"ML Admins may need to be grown, not hired."

Well... there's probably enough manure around this whole "A.I." thing to do just that...

[Anonymous Coward]

ML Admins may need to be grown, not hired.

Almost a canned BoFH episode in that sentence alone.

Grown from what? The spent seed of the C-Suite tossers?

Most IT admin roles reduce to resource assessment, allocation and management including performance tuning. So what particularly is so very different about the administration of LLMs. Running a model with a stream of queries is not too dissimilar to running at database system at that level I would have thought.

[Darkedge]

'Special Sysadmin then

so it's someone who has drunk the koolaid and actually likes LLM unlike most SA who know to stay well away so the stink doesn't get on them... That's the only reason it's a separate role.

[MrAptronym]

Re: 'Special Sysadmin then

Its a fall guy for when the LLM causes a security breech or ends up not generating an RoI.

[Guy de Loimbard]

Anyone else

Bored of the continually re-hyping of AI/ML LLMs etc?

I had nearly got through this week without seeing some shite about ML being awesome too!

[breakfast]

"Manage compliance"

Keeping your LLMs compliant with pretty much anything when they make up answers, it is trivially easy to trick them into bypassing security, they leak whatever data is passed through them to their progenitor companies, and nobody understands what they are actually doing, does sound like a full-time job.

[social_anthrax]

Re: "Manage compliance"

There are currently a couple of security companies working on ways to prevent data leakage as well as maintaining information boundaries between teams. It's interesting work and definitely requires a separate role. Not sure if the role being discussed in this post is doing that though.

[OhForF']

Applications with added AI?

>Doing so is necessary because as application vendors add AI to their products, they’ll assume users have the required large language model in place.<

I thought the idea is you do not have to change apps for AI, just just give the LLM access to all the data you have and the AI will then do everything you tell it to do with a simple prompt.

How would an application with added AI make use of a LLM a company already has in place? Where is the system architecture and system interface to that?

Did Nutanix provide some documents on how they think this is gonna work or is this a dream of Chief AI officer Dutta or the output of their AI?

[ecofeco]

The whowhat?

So is their office right next to the SEO manager?

I heard they also hang out with social media manager as well.

That reminds me, anyone seen the Ark B around lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said AI will destroy jobs?

So, AI requires more hires. People to manage all the hardware where the AI's are let out to graze and people to herd the AI's, and people to carve the AI's out of the foundation models, and so on.

The next round is that all these new positions can be replaced by meta-AI's, AI's that carve out and herd AI's. These meta AIs will require more hardware to graze and more herders and more AI carving.

PS,

The best comic about AI is Questionable Content. It runs now for over 2 decades. It was over the top when it started, but reality caught up with the fantasy.