This doesn't help answer your question (I don't think) by my observation... I have the same question and I got my degree 12 years ago. I remember my AI course

This doesn't help answer your question (I don't think) by my observation... I have the same question and I got my degree 12 years ago. I remember my AI course in college consisted of implementing a neural net in Lisp and memorizing a ton of dense text. It is really easy to take a Tensor flow model someone already wrote and tweak the parameters to make it work for your use case. I think that code reuse and open source is the largest advancement in AI in the last 10 years. So a lot of companies can use AI in their products without even really knowing how it work. Now once you start training your own models the hardest part to me is the vocabulary. So many tutorials and classes say "use this algorithm" or "take this code and modify it"... I want to know why I chose that algorithm, what were the other choices, and how do I write that code if I don't have an instructor to do the boilerplate for me. It is very frustrating. Hopefully some of the answers here will answer some of those questions. As another note, a lot of the advanced AI uses Calculus. algebra is not enough. I don't know what college you went to or what accreditation it has but by third year you should at least have taken Calculus II... maybe even Differential Equations. If you haven't, don't worry, 99% of programming jobs won't use them. But parts of AI will.