4 Tips on How to Break Into a Career in AI ♞ (And Be Successful! 🏆)

Last week I went to an OpenAI event co-hosted with Girls’ Geek in San Francisco and met a lot of interesting people. There were AI researchers deep in the field, ML engineers and data scientists, students and interested folks across many industries.

One of the most popular topics was:

How can I get into AI and build my career in this field?

Especially,

What if I am in finance? or in pharmaceutical? or in marketing? or what if I am an artist?

These conversations reminded me of how I started, and how a lot of my friends and colleagues started.

For me, I’m very fortunate to get advice from industry leaders, educators, evangelists along the way. Therefore, there can never be a better moment to share to the community these inspirations than now!

1. “Patience Is Gold”

I’m sharing this piece of advice from Google Brain researcher Quoc Le who pushed the boundaries of sequence to sequence based neural machine translation, and the author of the Google Meena chatbot.

It’s a cliché to say life is not a sprint, but a marathon.

When my 4 year old is chewing my ear off by asking “are we there yet?” in the car, I honestly feel him.

If you have a tangible goal, and you know it will take 100 days to get there, you can feel that weight on your mind.