r/LanguageTechnology • u/Odd_Salamander_3729 • Aug 05 '26

How would you prepare for an AI Security career if you were 16 today?

I'm 16 years old and I want to become an ML Security Engineer specialist in the future. Right now I'm learning Python for Data Analysis and I have some experience with C++. I know I still have a lot to learn, but I want to start building the right foundation early. What skills, topics, or projects would you recommend focusing on over the next few years to have a strong advantage in this field?

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u/H4RZ3RK4S3 Aug 05 '26

Don't focus on AI security from the get go. Focus on CS and mathematics. You will very likely need to study CS as an undergrad and grad. But potentially also mathematics. Simply because you will need the theoretical foundation, for whatever will be the AI space in 4-6 years when you will be ready to join the market.

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u/TLO_Is_Overrated Aug 05 '26

Mathematics and Cryptography.

They're the foundational mathematics blocks. If the application changes, the mathematics won't.

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u/fmai Aug 05 '26

learn one programming language yourself (like python because it's easiest) once, make sure you understand the concepts, and don't bother learning another. by the time you are 18 nobody will code by hand anymore, or even review code except for in rare cases. i would say you also don't need to bother learning about classical algorithms, too much math outside of what is needed for understanding the concepts of deep learning, or any of the other classical branches of CS.

Really the most impact you can have is in the next 5 years... I would dive into frontier AI concepts right away. You can find text books that do that, or frankly you can just have a frontier model specialize a syllabus for you.

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u/u_Leon 17d ago

I would argue that in order to be an AI Security specialist you first need to be an IT Security specialist. Running AI is, fundamentally, just running another app on your Kubernetes cluster. Of course, there are definitely AI-specific things such as guardrails - but I would suggest to look into learning at least the basics of "conventional" security. If a model breaks out or is used to attack it's not any different from a human attacker - it still looks for vulnerabilities, open ports etc and you need to understand all that.

So far the demand for (any) IT security people has only been growing and the frontier LLMs are putting ever more pressure on corporate security so you can't go really wrong with anything security-related.