How to learn AI & ML

People have asked me, how do they start to learn ML & AI. They are in their 30s or 40s or 50s, never written a computer code in their lives but realize intuitively that the world has changed and if you don't speak the language of artificial intelligence, you maybe left behind in a few years and I think they maybe right.

Like any new language, you need to put in the effort to learn. There are no short cuts especially with AI & ML. Yes, there's a steep learning curve, but it is not insurmountable irrespective of your age or experience with computer programming. Also, you don't really need to be an expert in AI & ML to speak its language (or use it in your daily life and profession) just as you don't need to be an English professor to speak the English language proficiently. Hence, you really don;t need to complete the proverbial 10,000 hours, but just enough hours to get you comfortable at the level you want to use AI & ML.

Having laid the foundation above, I'll spend the remainder of the post to describe my curated list from easiest to hardest of how and where to learn AI & ML. I hope you find it useful.

Get a Medium Subscription

Medium is a fantastic source of simplified information on very complicated topics. The reason why I recommend Medium is that the authors are paid based on the degree of readership so they have an incentive to ensure they reach as wide an audience as possible. This generally means writing about interesting concepts (what topic is more interesting that ML & AI:-) and simplifying it in such a way that their audience don't get lost. Clearly, other blogs like Quora and Stackoverflow etc. exist that do talk about AI & ML but I find them quite inefficient as a learning platform especially for beginners simply because theses sites have little incentives for wide readership. If you are not sure if you want to pay for a subscription quite yet, [Medium](medium.com] offers 3 free articles per month, so you can just register and choose AI & ML topics as your preference. With this, you get to read at 3 articles on AI & ML every month which is not an insignificant learning rate.

Andrew Ng's AI for everyone course on Coursera

This is one of the best introduction to AI for anyone I've seen. It's well done, byte sized and easy to follow. You will need a Coursera account if you don't have one and you can audit the course for free or apply for financial aid (if you can't afford the fee) if you want to do the quizzes and assignment.

Mark Cuban's foundation AI for anyone

This is an entire website that offers several virtual workshops on AI. You just register and you receive emails on upcoming workshops. You can find some of the past workshops on the website. Go ahead and watch and see if you want to sign up.

MOOCs

The advantage of sites like AI for everyone is that you are under no pressure to do homework, projects etc. However, decades of human learning have shown that human's learn better when they reinforce any earning by doing. Hence, once you've decided to get serious with AI & ML, you will be greatly served in your learning joining an MOOC platform and enrolling for AI & ML courses that interest you. The challenge with the MOOCs however is that they give few guidance on prerequisite knowledge, meaning you can spend a lot of time taking a class you are not well equipped to understand fully only to realize if you had taken another simpler class, you learning would have been so much easier. The MOOCs realize this and have began to offer full Master's degree's, nano degree etc. on their platforms. I'll definetely take advantage of these if you decide to get more serious in your AI/ML journey.

Get a Maser's degree specializing in AI & ML

There are also Universities offering online Master's degrees in Computer Science where you can specialize in ML/AI. An example is the Georgia Tech's Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) which has be hailed as step change above traditional MOOCs. The admissions process is quite rigorous - very similar to an on campus admission - so you shouldn't pursue this unless you have a bachelor's degree already and some significant computing experience.

In summary, whichever learning route you choose, you can hardly go wrong in this century learning a little bit more about AI & ML. Thanks for reading!