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.