As a mostly self-taught programmer, I honestly didn't grok the maths until I started doing my Master's, which is why I highly recommend going back to school. Ta

As a mostly self-taught programmer, I honestly didn't grok the maths until I started doing my Master's, which is why I highly recommend going back to school. Take a machine learning course at the best university you can afford. Speaking of which, while programming is a nice skill to have, most of the toughest bits of modern AI approaches, including neural networks, is in the maths. For neural nets, you need to have a solid understanding of multivariate calculus, statistical methods, and probability theory. You should have at least an intuition of what the error function is, and how error backpropagation works. In my course, we used the Bishop book (Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Pattern_Recognition_And_Machine_Learning.html?id=kTNoQgAACAAJ&hl=en https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Pattern_Recognition_...). It's dense, and very math-heavy, but it's definitely worth slogging through.