How did you start learning about AI?

[outer fulcrum]

What was the course, video, book, teacher or whatever that started your journey in AI?

I'll start - I went straight in the deep end with the "Machine Learning Course" by Andrew Ng back when it was in hosted by Stanford.

Took me many attempts to complete it, but I made it through!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMiGQp3WXShtMGgzqpfVfbU

[sullen idol]

I never did coding in my life when I was a functional tester. one fine day, I realized I should learn some python, I did learn python for few months and then my manager motivated me to enroll for Azure bootcamp for two days so to answer the question, first thing I learnt in AI was using Azure Portal which I think was a quite right start and then I straight gone into a hackathon 🙂

[outer fulcrum]

Thanks for sharing! That sounds like a good manager 😉

[sharp lodge]

It was actually a speaker at our monthly meetup circa 2018 and it was a Python themed meetup. I was astounded at how ML was drastically reducing lead time for X ray based diagnosis from hours to mere minutes. It set me on the path to explore ML and then AI as a natural corollary of it.

[outer fulcrum]

Love that, thanks for sharing! I also owe going to Meetups early a lot for why I'm still working in AI now.

[cyan violet]

First learn about AI is in university, but firstly being motivated to learn about AI is when attending Microsoft Build in 2024 (Indonesia). Azure Open AI Studio is introduced and it is so amazing. Now the tech is about agentic AI and it is a good news that now in my country which is in Indonesia there is Microsoft's data center which bring a lot of advantages.

[hexed orbit]

I got into learning AI when I got tired of manually optimizing settings on my experiments in the lab 🙂 We did optical quantum physics experiments and there were way too many degrees of freedom so I went and learned about ML optimization strategies and then we ended up creating a novel variant of one for our specific scenario. All implemented in Python with Jupyter Notebooks ❤️

[dusty mirage]

I got into AI when landing an internship at Microsoft and I worked as a Technical PM at Microsoft Bing - it was fascinating the scale of data and insights that search engines could produce at the time (many moons ago 😆)
During my internship I also took the famous Coursera Stanford Machine Learning course with Andrew Ng and learnt the best baseline knowledge that I still build on today: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction
The rest is history .... 🙂

[dusty mirage]

One of my favourite meetups ever was a Kaggle meetup at Microsoft Reactor in London I got to attend where a set of Kaggle grandmasters did a panel but then afterwards someone did a talk on their story of winning a Kaggle competition with their team at work - it was like a movie description, the highs, the lows and this made me continue to double down on ML and data science as incredible storytelling tools

[dusty bramble]

Most people don’t realize that AI came before Wi-Fi was even invented. Long before the modern web and today’s programming languages, I was sitting with physical books about AI. Finding a book like that back then wasn’t easy. It felt rare, almost like holding a secret.

During a trip overseas, I had the chance to meet with real engineers. That moment shaped me. I started learning software engineering, algorithms, and everything I could get my hands on.

Over time, I built a small machine learning system. By today’s standards, it was very limited, but back then it felt like I was touching the future. The system could suggest what was best based on existing data. To me, it was revolutionary, something only big tech leaders could dream of at that time.

Later, I built software that used BERT.

If you don’t know BERT, it’s one of the core components of the Transformers architecture,

For me, that was another breakthrough. BERT gave me the ability to summarize content and answer questions directly from text. It felt like I was watching the line between human knowledge and machine intelligence grow thinner right in front of me.

Followed by time, I’ve built an AI Assistant (like ChatGPT) but way before ChatGPT is announced, probably 5 years before ChatGPT, at that time bots were using something we call it “Intents” which is some kind of QnA, and the ML algorithm gets the relevant answer to the question, and with some tweaks it can talk with API and execute functions as well.

Then came the rise of transformers.
I began to learn about them and experiment with their use. I was amazed by those early models, even though today they would be considered extremely limited. I remember training them directly on devices to power mobile AI apps. At the time, that felt WoW, a step closer to bringing real intelligence into everyday tools people could carry in their pockets.

Step by step, I grew with the field. What once felt like distant science fiction slowly became part of my daily work.

Today, I have a leading AI company, built and building advanced enterprise AI systems, multi-agent architectures, and push AI into places I only dreamed about when I was flipping through those old books. The difference now is that AI is no longer a dream. It is real, it is here, and it is shaping the future. And I am grateful that I’ve been able to walk this path from the very beginning until today.

[outer fulcrum]

This is a good question for anyone <@&1118201594182377522> - lots of good resources and wisdom shared here. Keep it coming people! ❤️

[unkempt onyx]

Hi guys, I’m learning AI right now and I could really use some guidance. I’ve just started with prompting/prompt engineering and I want to dive deeper. I’m still a student, but I realize AI is going to be everywhere in the future and will even replace a lot of human jobs. What kind of jobs will still have good supply and demand in the future, and where should I start learning?

[willow bridge]

I started learning (like actually building AI stuff) using this: https://github.com/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners

[outer fulcrum]

This warms my heart hearing this, glad I could be a part of someone's story on getting into AI. ❤️

[willow bridge]

Hey man, you have created something insane for the community. Truly appreciate the work.

[inland epoch]

Hi I'm just starting python and saw this on GitHub and decided to join .
I just finished highschool and decided to learn.
I have no experience at all

[crystal hemlock]

@unkempt onyx you should start by having conversations with chatgpt. You can start by Discussing about something you. And then try to analyze how chatgpt differs in it's responses.

[crystal hemlock]

Good luck @inland epoch 👍

[crystal hemlock]

Hey @outer fulcrum 👋

[unkempt onyx]

Of course, but I want to ask in case I get more insight.

[bright ermine]

Hey Korey. Just wanted to point out that pre-lecture/post-lecture quizzes are not working.

[outer fulcrum]

Where are you linking from? I will take a look

[bright ermine]

Its directly from the github repo

[outer fulcrum]

yes but where and which one

[bright ermine]

I only tried the first and second lecture only not sure about the other ones

[burnt wyvern]

I starte to use the IA because all my students speak about it hahahaha

[restive cargo]

Playing with new tools at work.🙂

[dull raft]

Hi, just like Kin. Don’t know how to code. Is there another resources that we can checkout besides the links you guys shared? Thanks 🙏 in advance.

[noble lark]

My neighbor was talking about it. Then I was on a mission! I discovered a school called Outskill and completed a 2 day session. Boy, I was hyped! I then did a 14 day sprint and participated in a hackathon. And, here I am trekking along and ready for another hackathon. I am n8n expert and have several working projects! Building products for my husband's company and establishing my own company as a Founder/Developer. https://platform.outskill.com/u/83c1c8fb.