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Ask HN: As a physicist, how do I get a job in AI?

12 points by Astrohacker ↗ HN
Dear HN,

I'm a physicist who will be getting a PhD in about a year. I've basically lost interest in pursuing a career in academia. I believe AI will be an enormous industry in the future, and I'm interested in somehow getting a job in that industry. I'm a pretty experienced programmer, but probably not really at the level of a professional, and other than that I don't really have any skills in AI. And I don't have any connections. Any ideas on how I can go about making this career change?

9 comments

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YuriNiyazov
Your question is a little amorphous, so we need to distill it. Let's forget for a moment about your skillset. What industry would you like to be in? Do you want to apply AI to consumer products? Small business products? Huge enterprise products? How do you feel about a job at a hedge fund? Where do you live now? Where do you want to live?
Astrohacker
Thanks for the response. I believe many forms of AI will be huge industries (of course, they already are, but they will be bigger in the coming decades):

* consumer products

* AI as a service, like more advanced search engines

* AI for businesses, like data analysis

Of these, my favorite is AI as a service, because for a lot of reasons I believe that will be first kind of AI to be very disruptive (primarily, if you do it as a service you will have access to more computational power, and thus could do more sophisticated AI).

I am actually somewhat interested in finance, so a hedge fund would be great if it somehow involved AI. However, I believe that fractional reserve banking is fraudulent, so if the hedge fund is part of a bank, I would probably not be interested (and they probably wouldn't hire me, since I've written articles in public about this).

I live in the midwest now, but I'd be willing to live pretty much anywhere in the developed world.

YuriNiyazov
It goes without saying, but the field of "AI" is kinda massive, with lots and lots of subfields (or, disciplines that used to be subfields but at this point are massive enough to be called fields on their own, such as for example NLP and ML). So, much like in any other discipline, you will find yourself specializing in no time.

The reason I asked about hedge funds is that there seems to be a small army of people with doctorates in Physics working for hedge funds (not necessarily part of a bank). They are mostly in NYC and Greenwich, CT. Various forms of AI (NLP - sentiment analysis, ML - statistical modeling, many others that they keep under wraps) are in wide use.

And, of course, you could always get a job at Google Research.

hector_ka
Well, try ai-class.com first and see how you like it . You might as well not like this field. Or you might apply it in physics. AI is just a tool to do other things.
ahalan
Get a job in MLOS (Machine Learning, Optimization and Statistics), leave AI to Popular Science magazine.

here are some links

http://www.ml-class.org/

http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-good-res...

http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-good-lea...

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-resources-for-learni...

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-resources-to-learn-a...

glimcat
"leave AI to Popular Science magazine"

Really? I guess I'll go tell those guys working on the video games and computational finance to pack it up. Can't have people developing expert systems, natural-language based search agents, or route-planning software.

If anything, "I want to work on AI" is overly broad.

adrianwaj
I've read some of your writings. Just going to say, maybe look at politics, but never forget the reasons why you went into it in the first place.
iFire
My understanding is Artificial intelligence is for the unsolved problems and Machine Learning is what they call the solved problems. For AI, unless you can create an artificial human it won't be solved.