Example execution & resources: Self-learning AI in a year

There’s a great list from Daniel Bourke on the top resources for creating your own Artificial Intelligence Masters degree here. The idea is simple:

a) Do some great free courses online

b) Do an independent project

It costs about 0 USD.

I decided to get started in AI about 8 months ago. Based on his ideas I built my own AI masters degree consisting of a) and b). To get more smart people started in this space, I thought I’d share my version of the AI degree. Perhaps it gives you some inspiration for your own AI degree.

Here’s a collection of the resources & my project:

• Coursera AI for Everyone —1 week — Great to get a high-level overview & some business perspectives
• Harvard CS50 — 2 weeks — Hands down the best education I have received in my life
• Udacity Git & Shell — 1 day — Some necessary basics
• Udacity Python — 1 week — Some more necessary basics
• Harvard CS50xAI — 2 weeks — This is great to do before diving into a specific AI subfield (such as Deep Learning) as it offers a great overview
• Udacity Deep Learning Nanodegree (PyTorch) — 1 month — I was lucky on this one, as they offered 1 free month on all courses due to covid; Finishing it in 1 month was intense, but I recommend it
• Coursera 5-course Learning Specialization (Keras / TF) — 1 month — The first of the 5 is the most intense; I recommend lingering on the Math Videos for a while; Can you derive backprop yourself without watching? Do an example backprop on paper for MSE, do an example for Cross Entropy; Decided not to do the Andrew ML course as it’s quite outdated and includes Matlab
• Project: Hateful Memes Competition DrivenData — 5 months — NLP + Computer Vision combined so a great chance to dive more into the two; Finished up 2nd and wrote a paper in case interested

I didn’t spend a dime, the opposite in fact. The timeframes may look like I rushed through them, but I just allocated all time available to it. Don’t worry if some take a bit longer, it’s more important to dive deep and finish all the assignments (esp. for CS50 — always do the advanced version/both when two are given).

Feel free to reach out at n.muennighoff@gmail.com if you’re setting up your game plan right now!