Do you even know what AI is?

Why is every single university in the world (including Singapore) is obsessed with AI? NUS is introducing a new RC focused on AI, NTU has a special AI scholars programme. Do the students who enter these 'special AI program' even know what AI is?

Do you know that AI is not ChatGPT? Do you know that it is impossible to 'make your own ChatGPT'? It is not 'giving a model a bunch of input and get an output'. It is not that simple. Do you know that it is mostly math? Not like H2 Math, or even H3 Math (although H3 linear algebra is a good start), but at least 100x harder than that.

Does looking at these equations make you feel scared?

Bellman Equation, the backbone of Reinforcement Learning

AI is not easy. It is not for everyone. It is not coding. It is math. It's all math. In order to be competitive in this field, you must have the self-motivation to catch up with the super fast AI field. Your university mods will only teach you the basics (including the Bellman equation above, yes it's very basic). You must be able to stomach hard equations (see below), having no one to turn to (not even ChatGPT can help you at this point), and figuring it out slowly. Very slowly. It takes hours. Days.

DeepSeekMath Unified Paradigm, ingenuine way to combine all RL equations

Be honest to yourself, do you have what it takes to thrive in AI? If not, just be Software Engineer and make yet another ChatGPT wrapper. That's good enough AI. If yes, think again. Think it twice. If you are still sure, you are stubborn, but that's what it takes to be in this field.

Update: I am getting a lot of interesting insights from the comment section here:

  1. A lot of people claiming to work in AI mentions that they do not use these math. These are because they have engineer roles, which includes building scalabale systems, pipelines, deployment, testing, etc. They are closer to SWE than AI. You would be better off being a SWE first, then pivot into AI later. If not you will spend too much time learning these math that you won't use in your career.
  2. If you don't want to be a SWE (why join a special AI programme if you end up as SWE, amirite), you gotta deal with the math. No way out.
  3. People really hate math.

I will stop replying from now on. Cheers.