For readers who read that and think they still want to do it: > The vision of AI/ML/DS has turned into a nightmare of people shoving data they don't understand

For readers who read that and think they still want to do it: > The vision of AI/ML/DS has turned into a nightmare of people shoving data they don't understand into models they don't understand... Don't be this ^. Please. If you do want to come into the field, please first take the time to understand the tools. Learn enough to re-derive and re-implement the tools you're using. Learn the assumptions that need to hold. Don't just learn to point the tools at data and hit go. It's not like a lot of programming where it either succeeds or fails. Failures are often silent in this field. If you can't reason through how and when a given tool will succeed and, probably more importantly, reason through how and when a given tool will fail, you haven't learned enough to know what to use and when.