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Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

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Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#11

Post by tim333 »

matheweis wrote: post #9
tim333 wrote: post #8

From a personal point of view as someone also interested in learning a bit I think building something is often a good way to go. I kind of have a plan one day to hack together the neural network from http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ with some personally selected stock market data to see if it can kick out profitable buy/sells. (There is some how to stuff in the article under 'Source Code')

A "good" AI stock trader would in particular require some kind of real-world pseudo real-time data feed (pick your poison; Twitter, FB, news, even generic web crawling) Anything based purely on the stock charts themselves becomes simply a sophisticated pattern matcher and can't possibly respond to the actual drivers of price movement.

It depends on what strategy you are trying to implement. I wasn't particularly thinking real time. I'm more of a value investor at heart and was thinking of something like it looking for stocks where the valuation is underpinned by assets and buying when they are near the bottom. So the inputs would be something like some numbers from the income and balance statements plus the price graph.

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#13

Post by mindcrime »

Assuming that you consider Machine Learning to be either a subset of AI (as I do) or a sibling field, and want to learn aspects of ML, then consider Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. It's a great introduction and doesn't require a ton in terms of prerequisites. You'll see some multi-variable calculus and linear algebra, but he does the calculus derivations for you, and there's a pretty adequate review of the relevant parts of Linear Algebra.

In addition, if you don't already have a background in Calculus and Linear Algebra, then supplement the Ng course with the Khan Academy stuff on Calculus and Linear Algebra, or other courses you can pick up on Coursera or Edx or whatever.

If you get really interested in neural networks (which are all the rage these days) after the Ng class, there's a freely available book on Neural Network design that you could look at. It doesn't cover all the very latest techniques, but it would help you build the foundation of understanding.

http://hagan.okstate.edu/nnd.html

There's also a MOOC around the Learning From Data book that you could check out.

http://amlbook.com/

https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html

OTOH, if you're making a sharp distinction between "Classic AI" and "Machine Learning" and you really care mainly about the classical stuff, then you might want to start with the Berkeley CS188 class. You can take it through EdX (https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkel...) or just watch the videos and download the notes and stuff from http://ai.berkeley.edu/home.html

And if you just want to dive into reading some classic papers and stuff, check out:

http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/pubs_browse.shtml

and/or

http://ijcai.org/past_proceedings

Another good resource is

http://aitopics.org/

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#14

Post by aaron695 »

Knowing AI will be useless, it'll be like knowing and programming assembly language, for high end specialists only.

You'll get a framework/app/api that will deliver you the info programmed by someone really into AI.

It'll be business as usual.

Know API's, frameworks, how to analyse data and tools around this, know people.

AKA Just be a good programmer.

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#15

Post by truebosko »

abcampbell wrote: post #4

Well, first, I would try to understand what "AI" you are talking about and why you have so much confidence it will be big. It's a pretty broad category, and a lot of it is (still) very far from commercialization. It's almost like asking about "the Internet" in 1992. Here are some categories that may help to dive into... -Computer Vision -Natural Language Processing AClustering vs classification in machine learning -N…

Was discussing AI with my wife last night and when she asked "What is it actually?" I did not have a clear answer. This helps, thank you!

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#16

Post by S4M »

aaron695 wrote: post #14

Knowing AI will be useless, it'll be like knowing and programming assembly language, for high end specialists only. You'll get a framework/app/api that will deliver you the info programmed by someone really into AI. It'll be business as usual. Know API's, frameworks, how to analyse data and tools around this, know people. AKA Just be a good programmer.

Thank you for this very anti-intellectual answer, now I don't have to wonder anymore why programmers and engineers are getting commoditized.

Seriously, does for you being a good programmer only consist in calling some API or knowing some framework?

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#17

Post by matheweis »

tim333 wrote: post #11
matheweis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "good" AI stock trader would in particular require some kind of real-world pseudo real-time data feed (pick your poison; Twitter, FB, news, even generic web crawling) Anything based purely on the stock charts themselves becomes simply a sophisticated pattern matcher and can't possibly respond to the actual drivers of price movement.

It depends on what strategy you are trying to implement. I wasn't particularly thinking real time. I'm more of a value investor at heart and was thinking of something like it looking for stocks where the valuation is underpinned by assets and buying when they are near the bottom. So the inputs would be something like some numbers from the income and balance statements plus the price graph.

> where the valuation is underpinned by assets and buying when they are near the bottom

... is still using some data external to the stock charts, which should work great. :)

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#19

Post by pesfandiar »

aaron695 wrote: post #14

Knowing AI will be useless, it'll be like knowing and programming assembly language, for high end specialists only. You'll get a framework/app/api that will deliver you the info programmed by someone really into AI. It'll be business as usual. Know API's, frameworks, how to analyse data and tools around this, know people. AKA Just be a good programmer.

Part of being a good programmer is knowing, at least from a higher point of view, how the underlying systems work. OP doesn't seem interested in doing AI research, but learning the basics should help you stand out in the pool of other API-using programmers.

Re: Ask HN: AI is going to be big. How should we learn?

#20

Post by 27182818284 »

aaron695 wrote: post #14

Knowing AI will be useless, it'll be like knowing and programming assembly language, for high end specialists only. You'll get a framework/app/api that will deliver you the info programmed by someone really into AI. It'll be business as usual. Know API's, frameworks, how to analyse data and tools around this, know people. AKA Just be a good programmer.

This is an interesting perspective. Often folks do just go around plugging in various libraries and such.

However, the author of this thread I don't think was asking how to go about implementing someone's API as much as how to be the one to create the AIs that the APIs in the future might attach to.

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