How I became a machine learning practitioner • Greg Brockman

For the first three years of OpenAI, I dreamed of becoming a machine learning expert but made little progress towards that goal. Over the past nine months, I've finally made the transition to being a machine learning practitioner. It was hard but not impossible, and I think most people who are good programmers and know (or are willing to learn) the math can do it too. There are many online courses to self-study the technical side, and what turned out to be my biggest blocker was a mental barrier -- getting ok with being a beginner again. A founding principle of OpenAI is that we value research and engineering equally -- our goal is to build working systems that solve previously impossible tasks, so we need both.