“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

If you are starting in AI then you are in great luck because of these reasons :

1. This field is skyrocketing 🚀
2. There are plenty of online and free resource
3. Huge community to get help

Since you have decided to start a career in AI, you can see that AI can be fused to any domains like Finance, Health, Robotics, Defense , Aerospace and etc. There are endless opportunity for an AI student to start a career. The only constraint is you need to start working on it.

Get Started

There are many roles in AI field namely AI engineering, ML Engineering, Research Scientist, Data Scientist and etc. To get a job in these role, you need start learning in public, this is the first step in starting in learning. This step is optional but highly recommended. You can read this blog about how to learn in public.

Unavoidable Step

The next step is to learn mathematics. Don't avoid this step as this is the fundamental step for understanding what's happening under the AI hood. You no need to learn all the concepts just learn that what is what and where the concepts are used. The mathematical subject you need to learn are :

1. Linear Algebra
2. Calculus
3. Probability and Statistics Linear Algebra is helpful for how the data are stored and used. Calculus tells how the data are optimized for accurate result. Probability and statistics tells which data to be optimized and predicts uncertainty.

Getting your hands dirty on

The above two steps is only for getting warm up, now you need to start coding on a programming language. Most of the AI community uses Python and there are other programming languages like Julia which is similar to python but it is faster than python, R used for statistical analysis and data visualization. Just try to learn one programming language with the Data Structure and Algorithm(DSA) and Object Oriented Programming System (OOPS) concepts.

Learning the pipeline

After getting strong in programming, start using the packages like numpy, pandas for data processing and scikit-learn for machine learning concepts and pytorch or tensorflow for Deep learning concepts. Note there are many deep learning libraries available and I recommend you to use fastai library and learn the concepts from this fast ai deep learning course.

What's next

From this point, you have foundational knowledge about AI field. Now you need to start working related to your interested role. While learning participate in the knowledge competitions like Kaggle competitions, Dev Post Hackathons and etc.

May your journey in AI be truly remarkable! If you enjoyed this post and have any suggestions or thoughts, please share them in the comments!