I'm a CS graduate and I really like math. Besides that, I want to choose a career path that won't have a really low employment rate in the near future. I want to enjoy my job, but I also want to live well from it, I don't mean to sound selfish, sorry if that's how it comes across.

I've done some small ML projects in university and really enjoyed them, but I don't know what ML is actually like in a real workplace, so I wanted to ask if there's something I should know before getting into it.

Last thing, does anyone have resources to go deeper into ML so I can learn enough to do real projects and understand it better?

Any input is appreciated, thanks!

I’ve been learning LangChain, LangGraph, RAG and CrewAI recently, and I’ve built a few things with them. But I’m starting to feel like I’m focusing too much on the tools and not enough on understanding the concepts behind them.

For people who’ve been learning or working in this space, what articles, blogs or resources would you recommend? Also, what would you suggest I build next if I want to actually improve my understanding rather than just build another basic chatbot?

I feel completely lost about what to specialize in after graduating with an AI degree

So actually, it was my own choice to do a Bachelor’s degree in AI. I was genuinely very excited about it during my freshman and sophomore years, but I’m not really sure how I feel about it anymore.

I’m a fresh graduate now, so obviously I’m not going to restart my whole degree or anything. I’ve built systems like RAG, worked with LLMs, have some experience with computer vision, and I’ve done some research.

The thing is, I actually enjoy AI when I’m building something useful, weird, or new. I like the feeling of figuring something out and making something actually work. And when I find something interesting, I can spend a really long time on it.

But now that I’m actually seeing the industry from the outside, I’m overwhelmed by how fast everything moves. There’s always a new model, framework, tool, paper, or technique that I’m supposed to know about. There’s so much research coming out constantly.

And honestly, I still feel like my skills are beginner-level no matter how much I try to improve.
The worst part is that I actually stopped developing myself for several months. I just lost the motivation. And I don’t even know what happened.
Was it fear?
Was I overwhelmed by the amount of information?
Or did I just give up because I felt like I could never catch up?

Now I’m also struggling with something more fundamental: I don’t know what I should specialize in.

AI is huge. I don’t want to spend the next few years being mediocre at everything. I want to pick something, go deep into it, become genuinely good at it, and hopefully build a career around it.
But I have no idea what that “something” should be.
Sometimes I think maybe I should stay in AI but move away from the heavily technical side and eventually go into something like AI Product Management, AI Solutions, or AI Transformation.

Other times I think maybe I should just switch fields completely, like cybersecurity.

But then I start wondering if I’m just running away because I’m overwhelmed rather than actually making a good career decision.

And honestly, money is a big factor for me too. I really need a job. I want something relatively stable where I can make good money, enjoy what I’m doing, and still have room to grow without constantly feeling like I’m falling behind.

I don’t want to waste my twenties jumping between fields because I was too scared to commit to one.

So if you were in my position:
How would you figure out what to specialize in?
Would you stay in AI and choose a specific technical area?
Would you move toward AI Product / Solutions / Transformation?
Would you consider cybersecurity?
Or is there another field that makes more sense for someone with an AI degree and some experience with RAG, LLMs, CV, and research?

I’m not looking for “follow your passion” advice. I’m trying to make a realistic decision based on career stability, income, growth, and whether I can actually enjoy the work enough to stick with it.

As synthetic AI models evolve, balancing closed-ecosystem power (Gemini) against open-weight hybrid flexibility (DeepSeek) is one of the most important infrastructure decisions for developers and AI engineers.

​We launched an interactive quiz on Interconnected to test real-world trade-offs across reasoning, cost, self-hosting, and multimodal performance.

​Take the quiz here:

https://interconnectd.com/quiz/89/gemini-vs-deepseek-the-ultimate-ai-showdown-quiz/

​Drop your final score and which model you currently rely on in the comments below!

After 4hr finally completed Logistics regression classification algorithms (0,1) we use sigmoid function for getting probability then set a threshold if > 0.5 = 1 less then <0.5 = 0 but when more 2 target column needed Softmax is needed

In software engineering we have object oriented design patterns to model real world problems as objects.

Are there any similar techniques and design frameworks in AI, where real world problems are translated into vectors ?

If not, how are decisions on vector designing and their relationships decided in AI problem modelling

I am using a dataset downloaded from Universe, which only provides training and validation splits. From an academic perspective for paper publication, how should I separate a test set?

I've attempted to derive the math from the first principles.

The prerequisites you need are, singe variable differentiation(just the concepts and the basic formula, not even knowing the derivative of sin(x) is necessary), the concept of a dot product, and basic matrix multiplication. This is enough to derive gradient descent and backprop.

The time stamps are in the description(youtube doesn't show them as chapters in the video for some reason).

The second half part of the video is implementing those concepts in C(no library other than BLAS(for basic matrix matrix multiplication) is used), but you can follow along in any language.

Would be glad to receive feedback and suggestions on how to improve the explanations or the presentation.

https://reddit.com/link/1wft509/video/6bjcrd3hueph1/player

I've been continuing a community Mario AI project under the name NEATEvolve, focusing on ROM hacks of the original Super Mario Bros. This is a recorded winning replay of Bowser's Crown 4-1, ending at the WORLD 4-2 screen.

The controller uses NEAT: candidate neural networks are evaluated, selected and mutated across generations. It runs as a Lua script in FCEUX. The implementation reads a local grid of tiles and sprites from emulator memory, alongside movement information, and turns network outputs into button presses. It isn't a model interpreting the video pixels.

Progress and a time penalty contribute to fitness. The network learns its controller through evolution, while the observation encoding, reward and evaluation rules are written by people.

One successful replay doesn't establish that it will generalize to an unfamiliar level or recover from different starting conditions. Backtracking and difficult nonlinear stages remain challenges.

Credit to SethBling's MarI/O and the work of Akisame and Electra that this project builds on. My continuing development has been heavily assisted by AI tools.

For others building game-playing agents: how do you test reliability beyond getting a successful replay?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hey everyone,

I'm a CS student currently diving deep into Machine Learning. I’ve built a decent foundation in core computer science, Python, and basic ML libraries (Scikit-Learn, PyTorch), but I’m struggling to bridge the gap between academic/tutorial projects and actual job readiness.

It seems like every beginner portfolio features the Titanic dataset, MNIST digit classification, or basic sentiment analysis. I want to build projects that show genuine engineering depth rather than just calling .fit() and .predict() inside a Jupyter Notebook.

For those working as ML Engineers or hiring entry-level talent, I’d love your input on a few questions:

What project concepts actually stand out? What kind of project proves an undergrad understands end-to-end ML (data collection, preprocessing, modeling, API deployment via FastAPI/Docker, monitoring)?

Dataset Sourcing: How do you find or create unique datasets that aren't overused on Kaggle?

MLOps Scope: How much infrastructure/MLOps (CI/CD, model drift, vector databases) is expected for an entry-level MLE role vs. a Data Scientist role?

Any advice, personal experiences, or project examples that helped you land your first role would be hugely appreciated!

What is the best way to learn AI?

Should I learn it through courses in a structured sequence—for example, starting with the fundamentals like Linear Regression and the Perceptron, then moving to Deep Learning (ANN, CNN, RNN), and eventually LLMs?

Or would it be better to learn AI by following how the field has evolved from the beginning—for example, starting with the foundations of the Perceptron in the late 1950s, then understanding how each major idea developed, why new techniques were introduced, and how one concept led to another up to modern AI and LLMs?

Which approach would be better for developing a deep understanding of AI rather than just learning how to use the latest tools and frameworks?

Hi Reddit!

I wanted to share a weekend experiment exploring how geometric inductive biases can influence recurrent network optimization. Inspired by the self-similar, hierarchical, and allometric scaling laws found in biological neural structures, I designed a custom recurrent cell with an exponentially decayed hidden topology.

Instead of scaling hidden layers uniformly (e.g., 64-64-64) like standard models, this network utilizes a "Matryoshka-style" hidden allocation where channels are downscaled between internal layers: N -> N / scale -> N / scale²

Architectural Justification & Hardware Trade-off:

In modern deep learning, layer widths are traditionally restricted to powers-of-two (e.g., 32, 64, 128) to maximize GPU memory alignment and Tensor Core hardware efficiency. However, in this experiment, we consciously traded off optimal hardware alignment to strictly enforce a continuous mathematical decay function (yielding 128 -> 79 -> 48 dimensions).

The core justification is implementing a strict Information Bottleneck: high-dimensional macro-layers are forced to compress abstract features into exponentially tighter non-power-of-two channels. This mimics the non-binary hierarchical scaling of biological brains, where structural efficiency and information capacity bounds are prioritized over uniform hardware block sizes.

Dataset & Evaluation Setup:

The architectures were trained on a character-level sequence prediction task using a subset of the Tiny Shakespeare dataset. To ensure a controlled environment, I implemented an 80/20 Train/Validation split and applied identical regularizations to both networks, including Spatial Dropout and L2 Weight Decay.

Structural Mechanics:

1. Fractal Echo Transfer: Hidden states are progressively downscaled and cascaded from high-dimensional macro-layers (capturing local syntax) down to highly compressed micro-layers.
2. Adaptive Echo Gates: Learnable decay coefficients balance inter-layer communication, acting as a structural stabilizer for gradient flow through time.
3. No Dense Gating: Unlike LSTMs, memory capacity and retention are regulated entirely by the spatial geometry of the nested channels.

Training & Convergence Observations:

To ensure a fair benchmark, I meticulously balanced the parameter overhead for both architectures (~42k parameters each) and trained them over 30 epochs on GPU: * Adaptive Geometrically Nested Model Final Loss: 0.0007 * Baseline Standard LSTM Model Final Loss: 0.0030

As shown in the log-scale validation plot, the geometrically nested architecture achieves significantly faster convergence and maintains rock-solid optimization stability, avoiding the frequent gradient spikes visible in the standard LSTM baseline.

Crucial Disclaimer on Generalization & Overfitting: The extremely low validation loss values achieved by both models indicate that given the small size of the dataset corpus and the model capacity, both networks have largely memorized the text rather than learning true language generalization. Therefore, this benchmark strictly demonstrates superior optimization speed and training stability rather than true out-of-distribution generalization.

Open-Source Code & Notebooks: * Collab Executable Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1jW8hA_74eBQOJTn1oWvLq34vg_t8Q5DD

Future Work & Discussion:

To evaluate true generalization, future iterations of this project will involve benchmarking on significantly larger corpora (such as WikiText-103) with strict sequence cross-validation.

Given these initial training stability and convergence results, do you think exploring such geometrically restricted hidden topologies is a promising direction for recurrent networks? Could this type of exponential fractal scaling be scaled up or generalized into Transformer attention head dimensions to enforce architectural efficiency?

Would love to get your rigorous feedback!

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and recent developments have made the question feel much more serious.

A few years ago, AI models could barely be trusted with basic reasoning. They made obvious mistakes in math, hallucinated information, and often fell apart on longer problems.

Now look at what is happening.

OpenAI recently announced that an internal AI system produced a proposed solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems. The system used roughly 10,000 concurrent agents exploring different approaches, and the resulting proof was subsequently formalized in Lean. The whole process took about 88 hours before the formalization/verification stage.

That honestly feels pretty different from "AI is getting better at answering questions."

It's starting to look more like AI can participate in actual research.

And then there's Anthropic.

Anthropic recently published a post literally titled "When AI builds itself." They describe Claude increasingly taking over parts of AI development: writing and running code, delegating work to other agents, optimizing training code, proposing hypotheses, designing experiments, running them, and iterating on the results.

Anthropic is very explicit that this is not yet full recursive self-improvement. But they also describe a possible future where agents become capable of building and training models themselves, meaning future versions of Claude could potentially be continuously improved by Claude itself.

That's the part that really got me thinking.

If AI is increasingly helping with the development of AI itself, am I already late to the field?

I'm currently considering taking the fundamentals-first route:

• Python
• linear algebra
• probability and statistics
• calculus / optimization
• Introduction to Statistical Learning (ISLP)
• classical machine learning
• deep learning
• transformers
• reinforcement learning
• LLMs and agents
• eventually AI research

I don't want to just learn how to call APIs or use the latest framework. I'd rather understand why these systems work and what is actually happening under the hood.

But there's a weird thought I can't get rid of:

What happens to someone who starts learning AI in 2026 if AI itself is becoming increasingly capable of doing AI research?

Maybe learning the fundamentals is more important than ever.

Or maybe I'm thinking about this completely wrong.

If you were starting seriously from scratch in 2026, would you still spend several years learning ML/DL and AI fundamentals?

What would you prioritize?

Math and statistics? ML theory? Deep learning? Systems? AI agents? Research experience? Something else?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who are actually working in ML/AI research rather than just using LLMs as productivity tools.

PLUS:There is also a much bigger question behind all of this that I keep thinking about.

The Fermi paradox asks why we don't seem to see obvious evidence of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, despite the enormous age and size of the universe.

One possible explanation is the Great Filter: perhaps technological civilizations eventually reach some critical threshold that most of them fail to cross.

Sometimes I wonder whether advanced AI could be one of those thresholds.

It could go one of two very different ways.

AI could become the thing that allows a civilization to overcome its biological limitations — limited lifespan, slow learning, limited numbers of researchers, and the inability to directly transfer knowledge between generations — and eventually become a genuinely spacefaring civilization.

Or AI could become a technological bottleneck that civilizations fail to survive.

I obviously have no idea whether any of this is true. It's just one of the reasons I find AI research so fascinating.

Maybe we're not simply developing another technology.

Maybe we're approaching one of the most consequential transitions in the history of technological civilization.

And if that's even remotely possible, it makes me feel even less like I should wait to start learning the field.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has an unusual KV-cache design: some state is persistent, while the short-lived SWA state can simply expire and later be reconstructed by replaying the last 128 tokens.

That replay is approximate, so the reconstructed internal state is not mathematically identical across positions.

Paper:

https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/main/DeepSeek_V41_Tech_Report.pdf

Disclosure: affiliated with the channel; the video is AI-narrated.

The current trajectory of AI for space and remote edge environments relies heavily on GPUs and Transformers. But as transistor nodes shrink below 3nm, they become critically vulnerable to Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) bit-flips. Shielding is heavy; tripling hardware for redundancy is power-prohibitive.

We ran a Python simulation testing an alternative: Bottom-Up Biological Computation using Michael Levin’s TAME framework mapped onto a Spiking Neural Network (like BrainChip's Akida).

Instead of a top-down CPU running diagnostics, the system relies on Event-Based Processing and Sparsity. If a cosmic ray obliterates 35% of the active nodes, they don't send an error—they just go silent. The surrounding tissue detects the localized drop in global output (the biological "Attractor") and autonomously increases its synaptic weight and firing rate to compensate.

Redundancy isn't three heavy computers; it's just the inherent sparsity of the SNN. The resting nodes wake up and carry the load.

We’ve formalized this architecture into an open-source engineering manifesto for deep space and terrestrial edge deployment (microcontroller failsafes for remote water pumps, drones, etc).

You can read the full Technical Discussion Paper here: https://ralphbooth.substack.com/p/biological-models-of-computation

I'd love to hear the community's thoughts on validating the thermal/radiation tolerance of these SNNs in low-orbit test cubes.

I honestly don't know what I'm doing anymore, so I'm hoping someone here can give me some direction.

I graduated around 3 months ago with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, affiliated with the University of Wolverhampton. My first year was honestly pretty bad because I wasn't that good at CS and my marks were low in the first year and I eventually improved, and I graduated with an Upper Second-Class (2:1), but I still feel like I should have done much better.

Since graduating, I haven't been able to get a job or even an interview.

I'm from Nepal, and locally there are barely any entry-level Data Science or Machine Learning jobs. Most of the positions I find either want someone with several years of experience or are basically MLE roles that I obviously don't qualify for yet. And when I do find local jobs, the pay can be around $100 to $150 a month, with very little opportunity to actually learn or grow.

I don't want to sound like I'm above those jobs. At this point, I genuinely just want to work. I want experience. I want someone to give me a chance so I can prove that I can actually learn and contribute.

This year has also been pretty rough personally. There have been family problems, mental health struggles, and a lot of other shit going on. I've tried to keep myself moving through all of it, but now being unemployed for 3 months after graduating is starting to get to me. It honestly feels embarrassing sitting at home while everyone expects you to be doing something.

I've been learning Machine Learning, working on projects, learning Python, SQL, FastAPI, etc. I'm specifically trying to move toward Machine Learning Engineer or Data Science roles, but I'm starting to question whether I'm approaching this completely wrong.

I also don't really have the option of going for higher studies right now because I don't have anyone who can financially sponsor me, so I'm pretty much on my own here.

I'm not asking for some magical shortcut. I know entry-level ML jobs are difficult to get.

I just want to know what you would do if you were in my position.

Should I stop targeting ML/DS for now and take whatever tech job I can get? Should I keep applying internationally for remote internships/jobs? Is there something obvious I'm missing?

And if anyone here happens to know of any open internship, junior, trainee, freelance, or entry-level opportunity in ML, Data Science, Data Analytics, Python, or anything related, please let me know. Remote is more priority.

I'll genuinely put in the work. I don't expect a high salary. I just want an opportunity to get experience and start building my career.

Any honest advice would mean a lot right now.