[Astrohacker]

Thanks for the response. I believe many forms of AI will be huge industries (of course, they already are, but they will be bigger in the coming decades):

* consumer products

* AI as a service, like more advanced search engines

* AI for businesses, like data analysis

Of these, my favorite is AI as a service, because for a lot of reasons I believe that will be first kind of AI to be very disruptive (primarily, if you do it as a service you will have access to more computational power, and thus could do more sophisticated AI).

I am actually somewhat interested in finance, so a hedge fund would be great if it somehow involved AI. However, I believe that fractional reserve banking is fraudulent, so if the hedge fund is part of a bank, I would probably not be interested (and they probably wouldn't hire me, since I've written articles in public about this).

I live in the midwest now, but I'd be willing to live pretty much anywhere in the developed world.

[YuriNiyazov]

It goes without saying, but the field of "AI" is kinda massive, with lots and lots of subfields (or, disciplines that used to be subfields but at this point are massive enough to be called fields on their own, such as for example NLP and ML). So, much like in any other discipline, you will find yourself specializing in no time.

The reason I asked about hedge funds is that there seems to be a small army of people with doctorates in Physics working for hedge funds (not necessarily part of a bank). They are mostly in NYC and Greenwich, CT. Various forms of AI (NLP - sentiment analysis, ML - statistical modeling, many others that they keep under wraps) are in wide use.

And, of course, you could always get a job at Google Research.