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Discussion on: I want to learn AI with Python, but i dont know how to start

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hamishdickson profile image
Hamish Dickson

So I don't have much material around 1&2, but here's some ideas for 3 and 4:

Maths etc

Pattern recognition and machine learning, Bishop

I guess you might consider this a slightly old book (2006), but there's a lot to machine learning than just neural networks. Think how you tell if a model works or not. This covers all of that and a host of other stuff you'll refer to over and over. It was recently made available for free online

users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~wurmd/Livros...

Deep learning, Goodfellow et al

This is my favourite book on neural networks, it goes into lots of detail about why we build neural networks the way we do and there's a healthy amount of maths in there too.

Again, free online

deeplearningbook.org/

Online courses

There are lots of these:

  • fast.ai (free and uses pytorch)
  • deep learning specialisation, coursera (you can audit this for free, but it uses and old version of tensorflow, so I'm not sure if I'd recommend this as much as maybe a year ago)
  • lots of universities now put up their lectures online, here's the one UCL and DeepMind did together youtube.com/watch?v=iOh7QUZGyiU&li...

Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems

So this is a bit more on how to build things than maths, but it's a great book, it's worth waiting for the second edition to come out, the first one is starting to show it's age

amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1492032646...

your 4th point

So this is kind of hard, but I would recommend 2 things:

  • pick something non-trivial to build
  • enter a kaggle competition

build some stuff

The best way to learn AI at the moment is to build something. A lot of the top AI talent are actually just very good at understanding what a neural network is doing and how to improve it. A project should be hard enough that it takes you a while to understand and complete, but probably not so hard that you can't find help somewhere

some ideas might be

  • a hotdog/not-hotdog detector (youtube.com/watch?v=pqTntG1RXSY) you can actually build this pretty quickly
  • something which can categorise emotions from an image
  • if you're interested in reinforcement learning, I like the box2d environments here gym.openai.com/

kaggle

kaggle.com is a platform where AI competitions are hosted (there are other platforms too). Enter one. You don't have to do well, most of the magic of kaggle is trying out new ideas and learning. People share solutions and there's active discussion forums where you can ask questions. They also let you use a GPU for free (which will make a big difference)


The last thing I'd say is for most people there's a lot of material to learn, it will take time, don't be disheartened or intimidated and most importantly: make sure what you're doing is fun :)

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felipperegazio profile image
Felippe Regazio

Uow, that comment was pure gold. Thanks a lot Hamish!

"The best way to learn AI at the moment is to build something. A lot of the top AI talent are actually just very good at understanding what a neural network is doing and how to improve it."

Totally agree.

Ill start with the books while trying to build something. The hotdog idea, i liked that ;P

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hamishdickson profile image
Hamish Dickson

If you build something I'd love to see it

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felipperegazio profile image
Felippe Regazio • Edited

that will be great, try to build something cool so