Andrew Ng's courses tend to be widely recommended, including by someone I know who went from physics to ML.

This was pre-gpt-3.5 release. It's classical ML.

Definitely Andrew Ng's courses, especially for concrete explanations.

I am no expert, but i found the following really helpful to understand AI/ML from the basics;

1) Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering by Sandhya Samarasinghe. Old book but great for understanding.

2) An Introduction to Statistical Learning: With Applications in R or Python by Hastie, Witten et al.

3) Any Statistics and Probability textbook should be at hand for reference.

I've been following Math Academy's Mathematics for Machine Learning Course and it has been great.

Did you start at that level or did you work up to it? I'm about to finish Fundamentals I and I'm curious what other people have to say about the site.

I started at that level. I studied mechanical engineering at university (bachelors and masters) and have been working as a SWE for four years so I have a strong base in mathematics (more so in calculus and linear algebra, a lot less in probability and statistics).

But the way the site works (as I'm sure you know) is that you take a placement test and then they build a knowledge graph taking into account what you know and what you don't know. So in theory, I should cover all of the subjects I am unfamiliar with.

So far I've been liking the site. It's worth noting that I enjoy math, so I have fun doing it every day and I really like the spaced repetition aspect. I've only been doing it for a month and probably won't be done with the course until March at my current rate. Perhaps my favourite aspect is that it does take the guess work out of self studying mathematics, which I find it be a more challenging subject to self-study compared to say programming. This does, of course, mean that you must trust the teachers behind the product quite well but I have taken the time to research the employees and founders behind the product and I was left impressed.

I'm not sure what my end goal with it is at the moment. I've been fortunate to work for a big tech company in a product software engineering role, which pays well, but I find it immensely boring. I'd love to move towards AI, but not sure if that will work out just yet.

How have you been finding it?

Thanks for the response. I've enjoying it and learning a lot. My base in math is a lot weaker though, so it's taken me quite a long time to get through even Fundementals I. I'm almost there. I went into more detail in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408#42519882

I'm planning on improving my mental math this year too which should help with the speed of the more concrete problems. I love algorithm design so having a stronger base in math will be a big help.

The two fast.ai courses end up implementing Stable Diffusion from scratch if that’s the sort of thing you are looking for.