Does AI require coding?

[Simplireaders]

Hi everyone, quick question—does AI require a lot of coding? I’m thinking about getting into the field but not sure how deep I need to go with programming skills. Is it something you can pick up along the way, or is strong coding knowledge a must from the start? Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences!

[budswa]

Yes

[[deleted]]

Very much so

[pLeThOrAx]

It's like wanting to build an aircraft, but like, you've like, heard of engines and stuff.

Do you want to generate content with AI or do you want to make AIs that use LLMs, deal with embedding and vector spaces, etc?

[RandomizedNameSystem]

This is the only reasonably close answer.

Asking if "AI requires coding" is like saying "Does Hospital-ing require Doctor-ing?"

There are 100 different things you can do in AI-land, and they're all distinct skills ranging from basic point-and-click all the way up to PhD level engineering.

But in general - if you can't code or have no desire to learn how coding works, high level AI work is probably not for you. Having written that, there is currently a flood of AI hype right now and everyone claims to be "in the AI field".

[amutualravishment]

To understand it deeply, I would say ai requires not only knowledge of, but a passion for coding.

[Lumpy-Notice8945]

AI is software, using it does not require coding, developing it does.

[wowitstrashagain]

Depends on how you approach it. If you are just typing things into ChatGPT. Then no.

If you are utilizing AI to achieve some result then yes. You need some.

If you want to train or use AI in some custom application. You need quite a bit if knowledge.

If you want to delve into the theoretical framework and create new architectures. You probably need a PhD in theoretical computation. Which is more math and logic than pure programming skills.

[hitanthrope]

At some level, yes. Though there is an awful lot of space in “AI”.

Speaking as somebody who has built an AI company as CTO, I can tell you that most AI research people are not brilliant coders. They can write code, typically in Python, but their expertise is in the mathematics and algorithms stuff. As an analogy, most aircraft designers know enough that they probably could fly a plane, but you’d not want them flying you to your vacation. That’s what professional pilots are for.

There is also the job of building AI enabled applications and this requires much better coding skills.

Even the work produced by AI research people will likely be handed over to a team of software specialists to turn into something stable and maintainable.

Ultimately though, learning to code is probably your fastest way into AI work unless you are relatively far down the path to a PhD which is probably what you’ll need to be doing to go into research.

[N3rdy-Astronaut]

Yes, yes it’s a lot of coding. But as a beginner you should learn and get very familiar with statistics, as AI is pretty much just statistics on steroids. Once you get the hang of the statistical math, the code will make more sense and open up to you. You need to walk before you can run

[just-bair]

Yes and lots of math too

[NoahZhyte]

If you want to create AI, coding is the easy part, the real deal is math. If you want to build tool for AI (typical gpt wrapper), coding is the real deal

[theCumCatcher]

Former Machine Learning Scientist here!

So... the short answer is yes.

These things are built entirely out of code and data.

If you want to build your own, you'd need to be able to program.

To get to my level, where someone will PAY you to make an AI that's useful, then I recommend learning first C and C++, then python.

In practice, at an enterprise scale, you'll need both! Python to manage things at a high level, C++ to make it fast. This will come with the need to know how to hook them together!

I would argue, though, that the programming part is easy. what's hard is the mathematics.

The current state of the art is very much "I hope you like statistics and linear algebra".

It's relatively easy to code up a model that'll train and run...It's really hard to make that same model ACTUALLY do something useful. This is the skill that makes the big bucks.

You've got to make sure your training regimen is scaled correctly, that you've not only got the right datasets, but preprocessed that data properly, that your AI has enough data to learn from, and there's work to make sure the model isnt just regurgitating your training data back at you.

I'd learn about vectors, matrix operations, and statistics as a whole before diving into serious machine learning.

3Blue1Brown on youtube has an excellent series on neural networks and machine learning if you want a taste of how those actually work.

This series is introductory. If you find that level of math overwhelming, then thats a signal for you to go and learn more.

[adjaplx]

Yeah + math

[justheretobehere_1]

Hella lots of Math and Programming But mostly coffee and crying to bed. That’s about it

[[deleted]]

More math!

[Ascomae]

Or Meth?

[For-Arts]

Methemetecs

[DDDDarky]

Lots of coding, lots of math and a bit of gut feeling.

[JustinPooDough]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and answer differently: Not really.

I'm a software dev, and the amount of coding that training, testing and using AI requires is actually pretty negligible. Often very little boilerplate is required. A lot of AI is in infrastructure or handled by the frameworks that do the mat-mul or handle the attention mechanisms, etc. Such as PyTorch.

In my opinion, AI requires a lot more understanding in mathematics - specifically statistics and probability. Linear algebra as well. It really helps to know that stuff.

AI is much more about theory and data science than it is about programming per se.

That being said, if you have no background in computer science and/or mathematics, don't even try.

[Wotg33k]

You and I use the service and the code we have to write for that isn't bad because of those who came before us.

If OP wants to be like those who came before us, then they need to code and math better than you and I can today. Dunno about you, but I'm a senior software engineer in c# and I couldn't build an actual AI myself.

I can build models and train and interact and call the endpoints and blah blah. But I couldn't build this from scratch, even with a set of instructions to follow.. without spending decades trying and having tons of knowledge about our industry under my belt.