Open any feed today and you'll see people sharing what an AI app made for them: an image, an essay, a bit of code, a clever prompt. There's real excitement, and that's good. Trying these tools is a perfectly fine way to start.
But for most people, that's also where it stops.
Using it is a head start that doesn't last
When a new AI app appears, the people who learn it first get a small edge. Then everyone else learns it too. The prompts get shared, the tricks become common knowledge, and the app gets easier to use every month. Whatever advantage came from using it fades quickly, because using it is exactly what the app was designed to make easy.
That's fine if AI is just a tool you use at work. It's not enough if you want a future in AI.
Get into the details
The people who will shape what comes next are the ones who understand what's underneath:
- how a model actually learns from data,
- why it gets some things right and others confidently wrong,
- what it takes to train one, fine-tune one, and judge whether it's any good.
None of this is magic. It's maths you can learn, code you can read, and ideas that have been explained clearly by some of the best teachers in the world, for free.
At least attempt to build one
You don't need to compete with the biggest labs. Build a small model of your own: a tiny language model trained on text you chose, or a classifier for a problem you care about. It won't be impressive next to the apps everyone is sharing. That's not the point.
The point is that after you've built one, you'll never look at those apps the same way again. You'll know what they're doing, where their limits come from, and what you could build that they don't.
And if you only get partway there, the attempt will still teach you more than any app can.
Where to start
That's exactly what the AI from first principles course on this site is for. It starts with Python basics, goes through the maths and machine learning underneath, and ends with you training a model of your own. Everything in it is free.
Using AI is a fine first step. Just don't let it be the last one.