How to learn AI
tips I wish I had three years ago
Hey amigo,
Over the next 10 years we are going to see a large shift to AI.
Understanding AI will help set you apart from the rest and allow you to take advantage of this incredible technology in your career.
Over the past three years I’ve been exploring and learning more about AI to better understand how to use it and how to build applications with it.
It has been a lot of trial and error so let’s go over how I would go about learning it from scratch so you don’t have to.
1. Learn Python ASAP
Python is the backbone of AI.
Almost all AI applications, programming, research, etc has been done in Python to both train and develop models but also to build different applications.
Understanding and being skillful at Python will help you to better understand how to build with AI and how to create your own AI applications.
I’ve seen it a lot throughout my programming years where someone gets excited about a topic but they don’t actually understand the fundamentals so they get lost and don’t have a way to fix errors.
If they had just understood the basic fundamentals they would have been able to move a lot faster and get over a lot of the basic hurdles they came across.
2. Exploring LLMs (Large Language Models)
LLMs are the easiest AI to get started with exploring because anyone cause load up ChatGPT and start playing with it.
Understanding how an LLM works and how to get them working to help you be more productive and how to build with them is essential for anyone wanting to work and build with AI.
LLMs use something called prompts (basically just text instructions) which the model then deciphers and will spit out an answer.
You don’t need to fully understand how they work under the hood, but you should be comfortable using them to build and work with.
I’ve been working on building a course which is designed at teaching how to work with LLMs for developers and engineers, so if that’s interesting to you, you can respond to this email with some things that you would like to know about LLMs :)
3. Project Based Learning
The next way to fully grasp AI is to build actual projects with it.
If you build projects, you’ll make learning about any topic much easier.
These projects can be anything:
Build a chatbot app
Train and deploy your own ML model
Use computer vision to detect soccer players
Take a course and build your own neural network
Build an AI agent that analyzes stocks and places trades for you
There’s a ton of things to build and work on.
Find something you are curious about and then build an application, model, etc to either solve your own problems or understand better.
That way it wil be easier to focus and get over hurdles while building and exploring this technology.