Who's going to hire these people? "I got a C in calculus back in school, but I took a deep learning class online and did a few of the assignments". This definitely may affect the market, but I doubt this will have an affect on the hiring bar or compensation for top companies/jobs in the space.
Most of these people already have jobs, doing junior- or middle- level programming. This bullet point on their resume will help their career progress, not start.
Is there a reason to assume that people who would participate are the kinds that would have gotten "a C in calculus?" Also, where are you seeing that the administrators of this course are suggesting that students will be fully prepared to be hired as ML practitioners as soon as they finish?
I'm not seeing the administrators do anything of the sort - responding to the guy above me suggesting that these courses could be a factor in a potential glut of professionals in the field.
I am definitely being harsh in my analysis - however, try to picture the average software developer or student attempting to learn this. I'm seeing a lecture on deep generative models. Crack open the deep learning bible and crack open to that chapter - reading through that and understanding everything will realistically be way beyond the ability of most of the people attempting the course. If I were hiring someone to use RBM's or an autoencoder or something like that, I'd want to be positive they have a strong understanding of them - in the same way you might ask a software dev in an interview some stupid bubblesort question to ensure he didn't copy his friends code to get his degree.
I still don't think top hiring bars will lower if supply increases ( and they shouldn't). ML is a hard field with a lot of complicated math - you can definitely teach a focused individual to use it in a month or two and hire them - but, on paper, they're still not going to stack up against masters/PHDs from top schools who understand all the math involved, are able to expand the toolset as needed, have proven experience tackling research problems, etc. Just my two cents.
You're right. Simply increasing supply of candidates will not increase demand from employers for those candidates.
However, if ML continues to become more and more important for businesses to remain competitive (and there seem to be a lot of indications that it will), you can bet that demand will increase and then, eventually, supply. Perhaps you could even argue that that is what's driving the current increase in supply.
Either way, companies will probably eventually feel a lot of pressure to look beyond academic credentials if they want to actually build up teams focused on those technologies.
I definitely agree; something like that may happen, though, I'm not sure how sustainable or successful that would be. I remember someone posting a famous diagram awhile back about the adoption curve of technologies, and how with ML we may be approaching an unsustainable glut that will even out soon. We'll definitely see how these things play out over the coming years.
