How I went from finance → AI

How I went from dead-end financial consulting and no technical skills to machine learning engineering in 5 years, and then to AI research 3 years later.

My guiding principle was to maximize my usefulness - I never planned farther than 6 months ahead. If I'd seen this roadmap in 2012 I probably would've given up immediately and started that pub crawl business.

Tip: try zooming out until the columns line up.

I loved my job as an AI researcher. Research is simply learning the answers to questions that nobody has asked before, so the learning skills I’ve accumulated served me well. But I had no choice but to quit: the Archive had broken up during the pandemic, and I couldn’t stop thinking about starting a community that would last for 50 years instead of 5.

I usually encourage people to start programming if they love to build and could imagine themselves being a programmer for 5+ years.

I generally recommend the Bloom Institute of Technology, because it’s one of the longest bootcamps and because it briefly covers computer science fundamentals. Be advised: you get out of it what you put into it, so prepare yourself like it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.

There are many folks with business skills that want to “learn how to talk to engineers”, learn how to build their own MVPs, or otherwise don’t plan to be a full-time programmer for the bulk of their career. I usually discourage these folks from going to a bootcamp or taking intro to programming courses. Instead, I’d bet on the no-code movement. Here’s a curriculum I prepared for a friend:

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