I know very little so please don’t mind a lot of stupid questions.
I want to do my masters in AI/ML but afraid that it will be difficult for me to understand. I am not a bright student and struggle with understanding maths a lot. how much maths does an average AI/ML person do in their job? what things I should keep in mind while learning AI/ML?
does whole AI/ML landscape has been taken over by LLMs? I have seen a lot of people complaining about CEOs shoving LLM every where instead of just a simple ML model.
what does AI/ML people do exactly? I mean what are their roles? does the most important task for an AI/ML person is to decide which model to use or is it preparing the data or understanding the requirements?
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I work in AI/ML, and it’s such a hilariously broad and meaningless field I don’t even do remotely the same thing as my coworker in the same team hired on the same day. They work in agentic llm swarm research I work in CV/RL. Here’s three papers I had to read recently, and not fully understand but extract usable insight from (why did they do what they did and can I use that for myself)
LTGNN line transformer graph neural networks for robust line feature matchingjust kidding this one isn’t on arxivIt takes me a couple hours to deeply read a paper, I’m not like, getting 100% from it till like the 4th read through and a couple pages of notes, or reading a couple background papers (such as the JBU paper for UpAnything). Try reading one or two and if it seems interesting then maybe that’s an area in AI ML that might be interesting to you.
Remember the people doing the most math are the people doing ai ML academically in a masters or PhD, us commercial users tend to do less math and more “this new model came out can we apply it to our problem”
I think I have to get used to reading scientific papers. could you tell me where to start, I mean some papers which doesn’t require a lot of pre-knowledge?
Unfortunately, the field is pretty brutal about just assuming you are fully caught up to everything in the field, or that you will read the references for a given statement. You often don’t need to know all the math, but at least have a general idea of what some concepts are. I’ve been part of ‘journal clubs’ for the past 5 years where the only really goal is to stay abreast of the changes going on so that a new paper doesn’t send me down a rabbit hole of reading a referenced paper, which also has unknown terms, and read those references, etcetcetera.
I’m not in a great position to give useful advice due to that. it might be a good approach to find a youtuber who gives a 20-30 minute review/summary of a single paper that looks interesting, and of the video makes sense, then try to read the paper, and if you get stuck, see if the YouTuber has a video on the concept that got you stuck.
Are you in CS now? How did you do in the algorithms class. Treat that class as the deciding factor of how much you will like it.
yes, I did okay in algorithms class. but I am sure if I give enough efforts I can do this
Masters degrees aren’t for people who did okay.
If there were circumstances that contributed to not doing as well as you could have you don’t need to feel like you could do better, you need a specific plan to do better.
Masters degrees aren’t for people who did okay.
fine, you got me! I was terrible at it. but don’t I deserve a second chance?? I will do better in Masters.
If there were circumstances that contributed to not doing as well as you could have you don’t need to feel like you could do better, you need a specific plan to do better.
I didn’t admit it in the post but I wasn’t mentally well when I was doing Masters. I had severe social anxiety and afraid of everything. which contributed into not so good performance in bachelors. but now after taking medicines for 2 years I am fine. it feels like Masters could be my second chance.
I would not enter AI/ML for one simple reason: it is oversaturated. Everyone and their brother is in tgis field, and even those outside of it still study it and us it. Unfortunately the way to stand out within AI/ML field is to have a very good mathematics/statistics foundation and really understand the theory behind it. You would be better served by getting skills in another field that AI/ML relies on or where AI/ML can be applier.
BTW, you should also state what you plan on doing with your degree. There is no point in getting a degree if there isn’t a concrete benefit to doing so.
You would be better served by getting skills in another field that AI/ML relies on or where AI/ML can be applier
you mean something like python or SQL ? yes I want to master these tools but it takes a lot of time to do so.
main reason for having this degree is to get a decent job. besides it would be great if I can get into research area and teaching, I like doing that too
I don’t mean python and SQL. Anyone with a decent software background can pick that stuff up. As an example, my background is in high performance computing, networking, systems, and FPGAs. All of these are fields (well, maybe not FPGAs) that ML/AI rely heavily on, but if AI/ML disappeared tomorrow they’d still be incredibly relevant. Another approach is to study a domain science and apply AI/ML. For example, high energy physics leverages AI/ML, at least in research.
TBH, “wanting a good job” is a very generic response that needs more context. Are you moving from somewhere other than software? If you already have a software background, you might be better of self-teaching. If you are actually interested in research/teaching, that needs to be thought through very thoroughly. I say this as someone who just finished their PhD in CS, just to give context as to why I am being particularly intense on this point.
I am sorry for the terse response.
here is some context:
I have done bachelors in CS and didn’t do very well. I wasn’t that bad at it either. now the reason I am interested in research/teaching because I love learning new things and teaching helps retain stuff I have already learned. yes I am willing to give hours into it.
it’s really hard to pick a subject though, I was thinking of AI/ML because it’s currently hot and one might have more opportunity in it. besides it I would want to know other fields for research. you have PhD in CS, could you guide me what we do and dont etc. what’s the process if I chose let’s say cryptography ( which I like ) then what would my next step will be?
the other person said AI/ML is saturated so don’t know what to do. it’s for sure that I want to get into teaching/research just don’t know if it will be AI/ML.
I simply chose my field based on what I knew I enjoyed. I already had a job with working in systems, and I had HPC/FPGA experience from undergrad. Basically, I choose topics that I had at least a basic understanding and desired to expand into mastery.
I will be honest and say I don’t think you’ve really thought this through. I would really weigh the pros and cons of the degree. Think about what you’d do instead of pursuing a degree. Identify a specific job you would want after you get your degree. If you only want to teach, you could be an instructor at a University, but the pay will not be good. If you want to do research, doing reaearch at a university level will require a PhD. Research centers will hire MS holders, but as engineers rather than researchers. If you want an industry job, make sure you actually need the degree you are thinking of getting.
For 99% of people, carrying on with the degree they have is the better choice. In your case I’d either make sure you consider the above or only pursue a master’s if you truly cannot get the job you want with self-teaching.
Asking how the job will be seems like the wrong question to me, when you’re trying to answer what the studies will be. I would check with your uni instead.
Studies could be focused on maths or not. Jobs can be focused on maths if you’re developing models and ml in depth, but is likely unnecessary if you’re just training and assessing and embedding models, outside of maybe statistics, depending on use and needs.
LLM is a hot topic, but I suspect it did not overturn general ml.
I’m not in the field specifically, but we explore and discuss it at work, other team trained a model, and we use coding tools.
Asking how the job will be seems like the wrong question to me, when you’re trying to answer what the studies will be
I want my study to be fruitful. that’s why I also want to know about job opportunity. it’s just that I don’t see use cases of AI/ML in daily life. the only thing installed is an OCR. wanted some perspective that’s all.
