I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and I'm planning to complete my Master's degree in AI by September. Given what you just wrote I'm not sure follo

I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and I'm planning to complete my Master's degree in AI by September. Given what you just wrote I'm not sure following AI courses at a University would be best for you, since as you guess, there's lots of theory and not that much of practice. In general, the practice you get is mostly related on the concepts -as in, implement this methods on abstract data and see how they work-, but the whole framework is setup so that you can in the end contribute to the advances in AI and develop new methods. If your goal is simply 'create something that is somewhat intelligent', I think you could easily read introductory books by yourself and implement existing methods. It would be a more efficient use of your time I believe. In addition my particular Master was somewhat broad in scope, so that I learned something from very different fields (Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Decision Theoretic Control, Information Retrieval, Neural Networks..), but in the end I still don't feel specialized, and I'll probably (maybe not now, but after a couple of years' work) follow it up with a PHD.