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by nadam 755 days ago
In my perspective it is more believable to get into AI as a young guy without higher education than someone like me: a middle-aged person with higher education with a family and a reasonable corporate software engineering job. For me to get into AI research, I guess I would have to work for less money for a while than my current boring Software Engineering job, so the golden handcuff prevents me from doing it. While for a young guy there is nothing to lose, they can shoot for the most interesting thing right away. When I was young, I graduated from university with an AI specialization, but no one cared, especially not in Eastern Europe where I live. So I got into reasonably-paying slightly boring software engineering.
2 comments
rramadass 754 days ago
I am not arguing about whether a "young guy without higher education" can make it. It is "young guy without higher education and a whole lot more fundamental and severe hurdles makes it on his own without outside help/luck" that i am skeptical about.
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7thpower 755 days ago
To be fair, I am not in AI research either. Sorry if I implied that. I am on the applied side building products using GenAI, we also do some more traditional ML development but I do not spend much time there.

100% what you said about being young with nothing to lose. I had been part of a "start up" so I had equity on paper, but debt in real life. That equity ended up being worth exactly what I had paid for it ($0). I worked at Home Depot (which was a great company) and basically anything was better than making $15/hr and treading water.

For what it is worth, at the time I (24) felt really old because I saw so many 21 year olds who would come in to the store and had houses and everything that I didn't. I felt like I had missed the boat. It's been over 10 years and I realize how young I was, and frankly still am.

My point is that it's never too late to try something different, especially if you are starting from a position of strength (a good career in a field that requires strong problem solving skills, like software engineering).

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