My AI/ML starting point, crash courses and roadmap

This is it. My starting point. I have been working with Machine Learning models for a while now, but I have never had a chance to learn the theory behind it. I have been using the models as a black box, and I have been able to get some results, or help as the engineer to build some MLOps pipelines - of course with the high level of ML knowledge required.

Back in my school years, I had a chance to take the first steps in the AI/ML world at the university (around 2006/2007). I have been working with simple neural networks, evolutionary algorithms (approaching the “traveling salesman problem” & “knight’s tour problem”), and other stuff.

But in the meantime, there was a lot of progress in the AI/ML world:

• The deep learning models have been introduced
• The image recognition models perform better than humans
• Specialized models like AlphaGo, AlphaZero beat the best human players in games like Go, Chess
• We have autonomous cars!
• The Generative AI models can generate the text, the code, the music, the images, the videos, and even the faces of people that do not exist!
• etc. (see more on The brief history of AI)

…and I have been out of the loop for a while.

The NLP & LLM era

Part of the evolution was my work with NLP models (as the MLOps guy), and this made me think about the AI/ML world again.

After the OpenAI released the GPT-4 model and exposed its capabilities within the ChatGPT App, the business world got crazy about the AI again.

Moved to the LLM exploration team and I have decided to start from the beginning and learn the theory behind it.

Crash courses

What would be the best way to move forward? It’s a really tough question - the AI Boom provided tons of free resources that you can use for your studying. I started with the Microsoft course, and then move to the Google one.

• The Microsoft AI For Beginners
• The Google Machine Learning Crash Course

Then I also checked the roadmap.sh, and found a few more specialized courses:

• The Deeplearning.ai Generative AI with LLMs
• The fast.ai Practical Deep Learning
• The Google Introduction to Generative AI

What I have learned?

It’s good to be back and “It’s A Long Way to the Top”. Definitely, I will have to recap some math and statistics again, however, I was going to do it anyway. Now I am wondering what would be the next step…

To be continued...