AI Builders - An Invitation and a Manifesto
AI Builders will help blaze your trail in AI - Join Us!
Intro
A few weeks back, a friend and former colleague (we both worked at CerebriAI several years ago) reached out to me with an intriguing proposal. He’s now in San Francisco at an ML/AI company there, and he is wanting to help friends break in to the AI field. He broached the idea of helping aspiring AI developers by connecting them to projects and other opportunities.
I mulled it over …. and the idea for AI Builders was born.
AI Builders - Our Vision
AI Builders is a community that connects aspiring AI builders to learn and build AI, by connecting them with AI project opportunities, AI learning resources, and other AI builders.
Motivation: For those wanting to grow their career in AI, ML, software or data science, there is a need to acquire skills and credentials in AI, and connect with opportunities so as to blaze a successful path and career in AI.
While there are learning resources, open-source projects, activities happening in many places, it is hard for many to connect to many opportunities. That’s where AI builders comes in.
Our Vision: We help aspiring AI builders blaze their path in building AI. We connect aspiring AI builders, including AI professionals and students of AI, to project opportunities in AI, AI learning resources to up-skill, and to other AI builders, to build collaboration and community.
We aim to connect AI builders with project opportunities to help build great AI - AI models, AI agents, AI applications, etc. These opportunities could be open source projects, professional collaborations, internships, academic research, startups, and other activities.
Building AI in open-source and academic projects is great for not just upskilling, but great contributions can be highly visible proof-points to open more opportunities.
We also connect people to “learn-by-doing” AI learning resources to help improve their AI development skills, and we help AI builders make connections to each-other to learn and build together.
AI Builders - Our Invitation
Join AI Builders: Let us help you ignite your AI journey.
AI Builders is a community of AI builders, helping others build and connecting AI learners, students and professionals with project opportunities, open source activities, learning resources, and collaborations. To make this community thrive, we need you!
We are a place where aspiring AI builders come to blaze their path in becoming great AI builders, developers, and engineers. An ‘aspiring AI builder’ is anyone wanting to do more in AI development: students, new graduates, hobbyists, and mid-career engineers.
If this is you, join us. AI Builders is a Discord community, so here’s our Discord server that you are welcome to join: https://discord.gg/Z5qrUce2
If you are an AI user that is curious to learn more about AI, you find value here as well. If you are further along in your AI journey as a working AI professional, you can benefit as well. You can connect with others, stay on top of AI project activities, and help our community as a mentor and collaborator.
Bring your project needs: If you have a project or need, we can help eachother. If you have AI project or AI application ideas but not the resources, we can be a matchmaker. These projects could be open source projects, startup projects and internships, academic research projects and more.
If you are looking for collaborators on your AI development, AI startup, or just have an idea, join the community and pitch it. That’s why AI builders exists - to help connect AI builders to learning, to projects, and to each-other.
So join us at AI Builders on Discord! https://discord.gg/Z5qrUce2
My AI Story
Why I am “All in on AI”
Artificial Intelligence has captivated me since my college days as a Computer Science student in the 1980s. Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" was an early inspiration, and I eagerly took AI courses and learned Lisp.
After graduating, I worked on a project that proposed a massively-parallel processing architecture (a million tiny CPUs!) to execute large AI-like workloads. It was ambitious, ahead of its time, and never got built.
Back then, AI was focused on symbolic logic and AI systems often required significant human intervention for training (think "Expert Systems"). AI wasn’t ready for prime-time. I moved on, earned a PhD in theoretical Computer Science, and built a career in EDA (electronic design automation) at Motorola and Freescale.
Almost three decades later, I came back to AI. In 2012, I took Andrew Ng’s machine learning (ML) class on Coursera, pivoted my career, and started worked in ML and NLP (natural language processing) at various startups. Later, I joined the data science group at Dell Technologies as an ML engineer.
A career detour (a run for office) caused me to leave Dell in 2022. As I pondered my next steps, ChatGPT shook the world. I realized the AI revolution was for real, and I wanted people to understand AI better and help them thrive in the AI era. So in March 2023, the “AI Changes Everything” Substack was born.
Now, I want to do more. Each day, I am using AI, learning more about AI, building AI, and writing about AI. You can’t get more “All in on AI” than that! But I also want to help people build AI and do more in building AI myself. AI Builders is a good next step.
… and Your AI Story
What’s your AI Story?
I wrote my AI story to show that we all have a unique path to AI.
What’s your journey? I am genuinely interested! Feel free to comment below, or even better, join us at AI Builders on Discord and share your story: https://discord.gg/Z5qrUce2
My AI story is far from finished, and that's true for all of us because we are in the early innings of the AI revolution.
I hope we make AI Builders into a great community where it is part of the successful AI journey for many people. I’d be thrilled if it becomes a part of yours.
AI Builders - A Manifesto
With that, I leave with a “Manifesto” on what it means to be an AI builder.
AI changes Everything. AI will permeate every industry, endeavor, career, and job from this point onward, for generations to come:
Generative AI amplifies professional workflows across all domains. This includes research, engineering, marketing, law, healthcare, design, and the creative arts. The entertainment industry and the tech industry will get disrupted.
Robotics, autonomous vehicles, and embodied AI are extending AI's reach into manual tasks across industries like transportation, logistics, retail, manufacturing, and services. AI will also enter our homes for cleaning, personal care, healthcare, and security.
The widespread use of AI demands a multitude of AI applications. We won't see a single dominant AI model but rather a plethora of many models, from powerful general multi-modal AI models to niche models tailored for specific tasks. These models will form the foundation of AI agents, applications, and services.
Most software applications will become AI-centric, leveraging AI features and capabilities.
Building AI-based applications is the most value-creating activity of our time.
AI models and AI applications require builders to make them. AI builders build AI models, AI infrastructure, AI tools, and AI applications. This is valuable and important work.
I am an AI builder. You are an AI builder.
AI builders can be software engineers, data scientists, ML engineers and AI engineers.
A data scientist wrangles data to create ML models, turning data into models. An ML engineer uses ML infrastructure to build and deploy AI models. An AI engineer uses AI models and infrastructure to build AI applications and AI-centric software.
If you do the work of data science, software, machine learning or AI, you are an AI builder.
If you read this far, don’t forget to join us on Discord so we can build AI together: https://discord.gg/Z5qrUce2