LinkedIn post – Maybe i'll quit

I love learning anything. So far, I've learned a lot of things, including graphic design, UI/UX design, Python development, front-end development (Angular, Next, React), and violin playing. Now, it's time for something new, so I decided to start my AI/ML learning journey, but there's one thing that's filling me with doubts and making me consider quitting. The uncertainty about practice ideas.

I learn by doing things. I never spend 10 hours or days watching videos without doing anything. It's always more like 1 hour of watching and 10 hours of trying. But this isn't possible in the AI/ML field because I can't come up with ideas for useful projects for me personally. When I think of some, I can't figure out if they'll be possible to finish in a week of hard work, if they'll require months of handpicking a huge dataset, or if they'll need to be trained on hardware that costs more than my hourly rate as a professional.

After 1 day of learning development, with almost no knowledge and skills, for example, I made an automation tool that was saving me time. In the next 1-3 days, I made another tool that I still use daily, even 2 years later. But this can't be the case with AI/ML. I can't come up with ideas for projects that I can make in 1-7 days and will be useful for me, instead of just another stupid classifier.

It's all interesting, but if I can't come up with decent fast-to-make practice ideas that won't require a lot of money to train or a lot of time to collect a dataset, I'll quit AI/ML learning, since I can't learn without getting rewards (like projects which could make my life easier/better) real fast :(