Hi, I’m Zach.
My background is in software engineering, but I took the original Andrew Ng Machine Learning course on Coursera way back before any foundation models dropped and AI took the world by storm. However, considering I had no formal schooling past high school (and still don’t) it didn’t seem like a realistic or pragmatic field for me to pursue.
That said, I feel that we’re experiencing a culture shift in regards to formal education and its importance in starting a career, and perhaps jumping to a more AI-focused role might be more reasonable for me now.
I recently began to read AI Engineering by Chip Huyen and the Transformer architecture, specifically the self-attention mechanism, both fascinated and bewildered me, so I was seeking out resources to better understand it when I rediscovered DeepLearning.AI… taking the Andrew Ng course has been something of a core memory for me, so I thought what better way to prepare myself for an attempt at a career change than to join a community of fellow learners.
Happy to be here, and I hope to be of some help where I can.