How do I get started on learning AI / Machine Learning?

Hi, I'm a Data Scientist / ML Engineer and many people ask me the same question: How do I get started on learning AI / Machine Learning? I'll try to give you a quick answer here as I see that this topic is also hot in the Indie Hacker scene.

First thing to know: you'll first learn Machine Learning and then Deep Learning in case you want to go further. AI is only a marketing word right now. You'll discover it once you get into ML and DL.

So, what should be your starting point to learn ML?

• You should have coding skills. Not advanced coding skills, but you have to learn the basics.
• You should have basic Math notions: statistics and probability, basic algebra (matrix multiplications is something common at least in neural networks) and basic calculus (understand what is a derivative and how it can be used to optimize a certain function).

Summarizing, if your background is technical, you should be more than comfortable to start on learning ML.

Which are the best resources to learn ML?

• Book: Hands on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and Tensorflow by Aurélien-Géron
• Video Course: Introduction to ML for coders (by fast.ai's founder Jeremy Howard) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfYUBJiXbdtSyktd8A_x0JNd6lxDcZE96

How could you transition to DL?
My book in this case would be "Deep Learning with Python" by Francois Chollet. He's the creator of Keras, one of the two most famous DL frameworks nowadays. You could also follow the rest of fast.ai courses, which use another framework called Pytorch (fast.ai is also a library built on top of Pytorch which makes things simpler).

In case you have any question, please ask me. You can also do it on Twitter DMs if you prefer (twitter.com/rodbarest). I hope this helps :)