Beginner AI, where to start?
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@scottalanmiller said in Beginner, where to start?:
@Julien said in Beginner, where to start?:
Let's use an exemple, I learned some blacksmith skills with my grandfather when I was young, it was clear that to build a knife you need your set of tools and practice. I didn't have to choose between 10 type of hammers, 20 type of stoves...
I worked in metal manufacturing. Choosing the "blacksmith tools" alone means you just chose one of many hammers and stoves. You just worked with whatever tools were already at hand. But you had hundreds of different ways to make a knife. Your mentor, in that case, did the choosing for you.
But if you were asking me how to make a knife, I'd be pretty unlikely to approach it anything like how your grandfather did. I might not even use the same kinds of materials. I might even talk about glass, obsidian, or ceramic knives!
You can approach AI in the same way. Pick a language at more or less random. Pick a framework more or less at random. And just start going at it. Or you can try to learn all the possible ways to do it.
But there is a certain value to seeing how actual people who do the job you want to do do it, and then use the same tools as them. I think that hardest part right now is defining who it is that you want to emulate.
I see.
My example with blacksmith was mostly to express how frustrating it is to do not know where to start at first. In my mind the language matter on what you are interested and is a long process so you better not choose the wrong one.
Also, sometimes internet doesn't help to guide beginners haha -
@Julien said in Beginner, where to start?:
In my mind the language matter on what you are interested and is a long process so you better not choose the wrong one.
I think you'll find that that fades away. Once you really learn Python and you are learning C# or Go or Java you are going to be like "Oh wow, this is ridiculously easy to learn!"
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One of the best ways to get started without having a software engineering job is to pick a project that you like. Either a project for you to undertake; or an existing project that you can join like an open source project, and just jump in and attempt to contribute. This gives you two things... first a portfolio piece to talk about; and secondly it gives you a concrete goal on things to learn.
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Thank you all for your kindness, it feels less cloudy in my mind.
I really appreciate all of those advice! -
Something that you'll find quickly is that learning a language is almost a background task. At first, or if you talk to universities, they talk about languages all of the time. But in the real world, they don't matter all that much.
Example... if you work in PHP, meh, whatever. Once you work in PHP then you have to decide if you are working with or without a framework. There are so many PHP frameworks. Examples are CakePHP and Laravel. Each of those frameworks is loaded with framework options.
You easily spend more time learning the framework than you do the language. Don't get too lost in the language itself, it's not as important as it seems.
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@scottalanmiller said in Beginner, where to start?:
One of the best ways to get started without having a software engineering job is to pick a project that you like. Either a project for you to undertake; or an existing project that you can join like an open source project, and just jump in and attempt to contribute. This gives you two things... first a portfolio piece to talk about; and secondly it gives you a concrete goal on things to learn.
I don't know if you call those projects, but I passed the nanodegree from Udacity "Intro to programming" (which I don't recommend haha), then I started to build a little software to talk with (It was more like I was talking to myself because the output were written by me lol).
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@scottalanmiller said in Beginner, where to start?:
One of the best ways to get started without having a software engineering job is to pick a project that you like. Either a project for you to undertake; or an existing project that you can join like an open source project, and just jump in and attempt to contribute. This gives you two things... first a portfolio piece to talk about; and secondly it gives you a concrete goal on things to learn.
I did this with the EverQuest Emulator Project around 2009. I wanted to grow my programming skillset as I only really knew VB.net.
I started by working on the quests. That was all in Perl when I started, and I was part of the team that started the migration to Lua.
Over time, as I worked on quests, I became more familiar with the server code and began to contribute back to that also, which is all in C++.
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Start here: https://developer.nvidia.com/
Pick up a development kit like Nvidia Jetson and learn by doing.
When you know more, you'll know what your next step has to be. -
Want to see an interesting AI project that is in the wild, check out DeepL
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Welcome!
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Thanks again everyone for all of the informations!
