Congratulations to Alexander Erfurt for earning the Stanford Professional Certificate?in Artificial Intelligence! Staying up to speed in this incredibly dynamic field requires a commitment to lifelong learning and you deserve to be proud of this accomplishment! More info about the program ?? https://lnkd.in/gGx9Q7NE
Sr. AI/ML Customer Engineer | GenAI, Deep Learning | Stanford AI Professional Program | Public Speaker
It’s done, achievement unlocked so to speak …even though I’d say the journey is the goal itself! ?? After almost 3 years of balancing job, parenthood and studying ?? , I've finally completed the AI Professional Program from the Stanford School of Engineering. This program, covering AI Principles and Techniques and selected courses such as Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning and Deep Generative Models, was a challenging but fun opportunity to refresh the foundations and dive into the latest AI advancements. In fact, I already work in AI and would consider myself an expert, however, this field is quite broad and as by now everyone should have noticed - it’s crazily dynamic! There is just so much you might not know about yet.?For instance, the course on generative models shows there are not only auto-regressive models (such as most LLMs), but also flow- and energy-based models, latent variable models (e.g. VAEs), and implicit generative models (e.g. GANs). Yet we haven’t even looked into techniques for training & evaluating these models, which focus on likelihood, which are likelihood-free and what are metrics for sample quality etc. Seeing all the different approaches for essentially “understanding” and “simulating” the world, is wild to say the least. I’m a strong believer in life-long and continuous learning. There is always a lot of "we don’t know what we don’t know". And with the rise of transformers and generative AI it's been a pleasure to refresh & deepen important foundations in math and its translation into code lines and algorithms. Moving more knowledge towards the “I know what I know” corner! ?? This hands-on program is not something I necessarily need to do my job, but AI is not just a job for me. It’s a passion that fills a lot of my private interests & life as well, probably the most exciting and promising technology of our lifetime - if not ever! I can’t help but need to understand the "how" behind the magic – how we enable machines to write, paint, compose and simply create? in so many ways. If you are also interested in going deeper and more hands-on in (Gen)AI, I highly recommend this program! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Thanks Stanford faculty Percy Liang, Christopher Manning, Stefano Ermon for sharing your expertise in such an engaging way. Not to forget the always helpful and patient program and course facilitators Daud Gill, Petra Parikova, Sebastian Hurubaru, Richard Wang, Farhad Ghassemi to name but a few. You made this an outstanding experience, I learned a lot ..and most importantly, I enjoyed it all the way! ?? On a more personal note, big thanks ?? to my current and former managers who have always been very encouraging and supportive to make time for learning and personal growth: Steven Mc Auley, Alexander Del Toro Barba, Matthias Ingerfeld and Dr. Stefan Ebener. #AI #Stanford #DeepLearning #GenerativeModels #GenAI #LifelongLearning #PersonalGrowth #Google #GoogleCloud