It depends on a couple different variables:<p>- Do you want to focus on a specific area with decades of history (e.g. computer vision), or do you want to be a jack-of-all-trades person that works with images, text, time-series data, and so forth?<p>- Do you want to work at an early-stage startup outside of the Bay Area, which might be less picky with hiring... or do you want to work at OpenAI or Google Brain?<p>- Do you want to work in a team where you implement the ideas of better-educated, senior colleagues... or do you want to be the one in a leadership role?<p>The "minimal" path probably involves:<p>- A Galvanize (or similar) bootcamp to meet peers and mentors.<p>- Books and Coursera courses to fill in everything the bootcamp doesn't teach you.<p>- Winning some Kaggle competitions to show that you can build fairly complex models that have high accuracy on real-world data.<p>The "maximal" path probably involves:<p>- An undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or Statistics.<p>- A PhD in one of the many subfields in machine learning.<p>- Several industry internships in between.<p>Neither the minimal or maximal path guarantee success, of course. A lot of that depends on your aptitude, previous experience, ability to network, and the current job market.
I actually just did this. Courses online such as Andrew Ng's Deep Learning course on Coursera and Standford course papers online are where I started. Then began working through tensor flow tutorials. Then looking up papers on modern neural net architectures. Took a matter or a few months to be productive. In the end, I realized that although neural nets are very fascinating, working on training them is tedious and not as fun as working on product code. I'd rather use the neural nets in a product, much like a sensor, than work on actually training the net.
The absolute fastest way would be to do a Machine Learning Bootcamp like Galvanize or Metis.<p>Source: I did not know anything about how to use Machine Learning in my code just 4 months ago, and now I have just started as an AI Engineer.