Was homeschooled, which was mostly a mixture of taking university classes from 12 onward in math/science + lots of motivated self study that was evaluated solely through dinner conversation with my dad. Ended up at Stanford for grad work in applied math. My dad was a PhD in philosophy though, and I was a very self driven kid. I think it's very family dependent, and the selection bias, as others stated, of who chooses to pursue it is the biggest factor.

Were you homeschooled before the age of 12?

Curious, what did a physics PhD think of software development/research in industry in comparison to the wonders of equations and abstract beauty?

I loved my internship at Waymo! I don't think it was a typical software engineering or hardware engineering internship, to be fair, but I really enjoyed the work I did and felt my background was beneficial in me making as much progress as I did.

What's to stop a decently trained net (think like Image net level) from spamming the hell out of this?

In a strange way that would actually be great.

One of the primary goals of the project is to build a big dataset of tagged images. If a bunch of bots went through uploading and then tagging all of the images on DeCAPTCHA, that would accomplish this goal even faster!

But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of captcha? Ie, you verify someone isn’t a bot?

You bring up a totally fair point for the set of images that are on it right now.

But, as more users upload images that then must be tagged, the hope would be that eventually there is enough diversity in the dataset that being able to consistently recognize what's in the different images would require something approaching human intelligence.

GG