Becoming an AI Developer Without the Math PhD: A Practical Journey into LLMs, Agents, and Real-World Tools
For the past year, the world has been obsessed with what artificial intelligence can do for us. From ChatGPT writing emails to MidJourney generating fantastical images, the dominant narrative has been "how to use AI." But what if you're not satisfied just prompting models? What if you want to build them, customize them, run them offline, and deploy them securely in the cloud? This is the journey I'm starting now: learning to build with AI, not just use it. And in this post, I’ll lay out the core principles, motivations, and roadmap that will guide my exploration into becoming an AI developer—with a specific focus on LLMs (Large Language Models), agents, training workflows, and cloud/offline deployment . Let me be clear: I’m not here to write a research paper, derive equations, or become a machine learning theorist. I don’t need to build a transformer from scratch in NumPy. My goal is pragmatic: I want to learn how to train, run, integrate, and deploy powerful ...