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Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#52I think Ian Goodfellow's "The Deep Learning" textbook fits well to the list.
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#53I’m starting down a similar path with these two books How AI Works - https://nostarch.com/how-ai-works + Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/677608/why-machines...
Thanks for the recommendations. What's your impression of these texts so far?
I’m enjoying How AI Works but I have not made it to the other yet.
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#54Just do Andrew NG's course.
It will show you the maths, you'll build simple neural nets (from maths!) that can read digits and scale it from there.
While doing it, you may struggle with some of the maths, just take a deep breath and invest sometime to fill the gaps you need and continue.
Learn about CNNs and everything else step-by-step. It's awesome.
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#55Just do Andrew NG's course. It will show you the maths, you'll build simple neural nets (from maths!) that can read digits and scale it from there. While doing it, you may struggle with some of the maths, just take a deep breath and invest sometime to fill the gaps you need and continue. Learn about CNNs and everything else step-by-step. It's awesome.
Andrew Ng's course is great for the learning NN's from scratch, but not understanding how NN's fit in the broader discipline of AI.
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#56For deep learning: 1. Linear algebra. Be comfortable with vector transformations in the vector space. This is the framework to understand how data is represented and what is going on inside the model. 2. Calculus. Specifically derivatives, up to partial derivatives and the chain rule. This is needed to later understand backpropagation, the learning. It's fine to skip integrals. 3. Vanilla neural network. Study how a…
Do you have specific courses to recommend? Linear Algebra is probably a good one to be learning from Gilbert Strang.
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#57The following is not a take that will get you a job or teach you precisely how LLMs work, because you can look that up yourself. However, it may inspire you and you may create something that has a better-than-lottery-ticket chance of being an improvement over the AI status quo: Without reading about how it's done now, just think about how you think a neural network should function. It ostensibly has input, output, an…
One can easily build forward pass (forward propagation), for neurons or perceptrons. The learning process itself (which includes gradient descent) is something else entirely, I'd love to learn how to do that, I read a few articles and my stopping point always was multi-variable differential equations, I just couldn't go any further. You could obviously use training functions from existing libraries, but I'm not aware how to do it from scratch...
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#58It isn't first principles, but I would recommend 3blue1brown's ongoing series about neural networks [0]. I think there's a benefit to seeing the high level overview helps understand the purpose of the pieces as your learning them; it can help with motivation. Or watching overviews like this after the fact it can help bridge connections theory may not elucidate. [0]: https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks
entertainment and not learning
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#59Artificial Intelligence by Poole and Macworth was a pretty solid,and free, book when I read it for a class.
Re: Ask HN: How to learn AI from first principles?
#60Artificial Intelligence by Poole and Macworth was a pretty solid,and free, book when I read it for a class. https://www.artint.info/
Great recommendation. Based on the ToC, its similar to AIMA.