Pivoting to AI at 40
Pivoting to AI at 40
Swyx has this super inspiring post that you are not too old and this one opens in a new tab, and it set me on fire.
Swyx has two career pivots, finance -> software engineering -> AI. Ok, well, I have a few more. Academic philosophy -> coffee -> law -> software engineering.
Anyway, this was the career pivot I had wanted in the first place when I was leaving law. I saw the article about how much better translation was because of deep learning, and I saw what I was doing, turning text into different text, and the future seemed so ... obvious. So I started working on learning AI even then. But then I was laid off so I concluded it would be easier get to employable as a web developer so I went ahead and did that. The idea was to keep learning AI.
And then I kind of didn't. I had a job that I found intellectually stimulating, and there was plenty that was on topic to learn. I did a round of getting better at algorithms to try to get a better job, but that did not work out. I read Range and decided to give myself the science education I missed by being a philosophy major instead of an integrative science major. The early part of the pandemic I was busy reading my way through The Molecular Biology of the Cell. I am still somewhere around eigenvectors in Strang's Linear Algebra. I was just reteaching myself calculus (Serge Lang for single variable, Bressoud for multivariable) and physics.
And then ChatGPT happened. And I came across Swyx's article. So I decided in a weekend. It's time to learn AI. Devote all of my self-guided learning time to it. It's time.