Aleksa Gordic - Research Engineer at Deepmind & Founder of the AI Epiphany #17

Our guest today is Aleksa Gordic, Research Engineer at Deepmind and founder of the AI Epiphany Youtube channel. 

In our conversation, we first talk about Aleksa’s Bachelor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Belgrade and then discuss his experience as a Software Engineer at Microsoft. 

He then explains how he transitioned to the world of AI by doing courses, bootcamps and learning subfields like GANs, Neural Style Transfer or Reinforcement Learning on his own. He shares his learning strategy and gives advice on how to get into the field. 

We finally talk about Deepmind, how Aleksa managed to get an offer and his latest work on Flamingo, an impressive visual language model which sets state-of-the-art results in few shots learning on a wide range of tasks.

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Follow Aleksa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksagordic/
Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/

Useful resources:
- Getting started in AI by Aleksa Gordic
- Learning to Learn Coursera course
- Flamingo blog post

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(00:00) : Intro

(02:50) : Bachelor in Electronics and Computer Science

(05:51) : Transitioning to Software Engineering

(07:40) : Fighting the imposter syndrome

(12:49) : Software Engineer at Microsoft

(21:07) : How Aleksa got into AI and ML

(25:04) : Intelligence

(28:36) : ML courses and Hackathons

(33:37) : Productivity

(38:04) : Learning subfields of AI in depth

(46:36) : Advice to get started in the field

(50:18) : Getting into Deepmind

(55:27) : Working at Deepmind

(58:06) : Flamingo and other algorithms

(01:08:19) : Challenges and mistakes faced

(01:13:10): What is a good ML engineer ? 

(01:21:23) : One advice to progress in your career