Ask HN: Without a background in CS, how do I get into the field of A.I?

4 pointspmcp5y ago8 comments

I have always been interested in A.I., mainly from a creative point of view. Lately, after reading some interesting articles and books, I feel I want to put my resources to work in thinking and working around the ethical debate of A.I.

I am 35, do not have a degree in maths or cs, I’m a master in audiovisual arts, who has been coding fullstack for the last ten years and worked as digital strategist for a few years.

I’m wondering if it is possible for me to get into A.I. And what good steps would be. I’m willing to pick up courses both long and short term.

Does anyone have advice for me how to tackle this?

Maybe interesting extra info: i’m European, living in Brussels.

8 comments

Jugurtha5y ago

Hi. Head to https://iko.ai and shoot an email to the contact address. We'll set you up with a temporary free account with all the bells and whistles (notebook with GPU and pretty much all the deep learning libraries pre-installed including fast.ai related, object storage, automatic tracking for your training, Docker image creation for your models, and controlling both the training and model invocation with HTTP requests, etc).

You can go through the fast.ai courses as you've been coding for a long time. Just clone the repository in the GPU notebook and get started.

You can learn without the hassle of GPU/libs/config nightmare while you figure out if you like this stuff or not.

It's an internal platform for now. So please use my name or a link to this thread.

woah5y ago

I was in a similar boat. You can learn a lot by taking Andrew Ng’s deeplearning.ai course on Coursera. It doesn’t get into the statistical theory of it, but you get a lot of detail and practice implementing neural nets. It taught me enough to realize that I am not interested in supervised learning.

pmcpOP5y ago

Thanks,good tip! What did you end up being interested in?

PaulHoule5y ago

Make training sets. Nobody wants to do that, but unless you do the rubber never hits the road.

logicslave5y ago

Forget what everyone here is saying. Work on open source AI software pulled from github. Or start your own company based on a machine learning product.

apineda5y ago

For the uninitiated, what is a machine learning product?

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