The AI learning challenge: A lot of folks worrying about their work/career/job want to learn AI. Or ML? The #1 tool in Machine Learning is gradient descent. I asked Chat GPT what is it: “Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm commonly used in machine learning and statistical modeling to minimize a function by iteratively moving towards the steepest descent, as defined by the negative of the gradient.”
Huh? What’s that. OK. Let’s simply it. Think of a 3D mountain (triple integral in calculus). You want to find the quickest way down the mountain. Got it?
But, here’s the challenge. I’m a mathy engineer. I had to have 2 years of calculus, 1 year of linear algebra, 1 year of statistics/probability, 1 year of fluency of a computer language, etc. Anyway, you get it that to do ML, you need a lot of math and maybe a degree.
The Simple Solution: Andrew Ng, a former Stanford professor and now entrepreneur, teaches this intuitively on Coursera. No math. Just algebra and intuitive programming using preprogrammed. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction
Takeaway: If you want to learn ML and AI, don’t get a math or CS degree. Takes Ng’s courses on Coursera. If you want to get a math degree and solve triple integrals, go ahead. But, I’m now doing the simple, effective, and doable.
You need to decide what problems, what opportunities, what projects you’re going to work on.