What would be the right path to learn AI?
I haven’t been keeping up with AI stuff except for trying out chat clients like ChatGPT and others. I’m a software engineer working in infra systems. I would like to pick up now that things in AI have gotten real. What would be the right path to learn AI/ML stuff? I’m someone who prefers ground up learning from fundamentals and building something using that knowledge. Any recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks.
Well, it depends whats your cup of tea in terms of learning. There area a LOT of courses on Udemy on that topic (if you prefer learning from videos).
I would recommend looking around on HuggingFace altough I found it a bit intimidating at the beginning. The place is just HUGE and they assume some knowledge.
I would also recommend creating a platform user on OpenAI and/or Anthropic and look up their docs. The accounts there are free but if you put a few dollars in there, you can actually make requests against their APIs which is the most simple way of playing around with LLMs imho.
Here are some topics you could do some research about:
- Foundation models (e.g., GPT, BERT, T5)
- Transformer architecture
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) basics
- Prompt engineering
- Fine-tuning and transfer learning
- Ethical considerations in AI
- AI safety and alignment
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Generative models for images (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion)
- AI frameworks and libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face)
- AI APIs and integration (also frameworks to build with AI like LangChain/ LangGraph)
- Vector databases and embeddings
- RAG
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
- AI model evaluation and benchmarking
- AI-assisted coding and code generation
This may be interesting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38385257