The last years have been marked with great AI advancements, especially in machine learning.
Larger companies already make use of AI for some time, mainly because they can afford world class scientists to get things done. But as the knowledge begins to spread, more and more non scientist people become familiarized with the area and become able to make things happen.
Iniciatives like OpenAI and DeepMind aims to keep advancing AI technology while keep their studies and reports open for other people learn with them. This is very important for the world as whole, since the more people with knowledge in this area, more areas, especially poor ones, have access to the technology and its amazing benefits.
Here are 8 ways you can make some impact and have some profit working with AI (I will try to go from the easist one to the hardest):
1. Setting up services for customers
To make things easy, a lot of companies create easy to deploy AI products, in the form of wizards or APIs (as chatbots), that you don’t need to know how it works. But even these products may need help of some one that is capable to set things up, like configuring, feed information or setup a server. This is a good way for a non-ai person get into the area.
2. Create online or local classes
Artificial inteligence has been around for the last years and more and more people are getting interested in it every day. The fast advancements that are occuring in the field, often create gaps of learn contents (especially in non-english languages). There is some great companies helping filling these gaps, like Udacity and Coursera (cofounded by the AI guru Andrew Ng), but there is always space for people willing to teach new things in different ways, using platforms like Udemy.
3. Data science competitions
There is data science competitions online (like Kaggle) where people dispute in creating the best model that performs in a given task, like predict house prices or classify images. These competitions often involve companies real problems and despite being a great resource of education and research, some of them also offer rewards of thousands of dollars for the best models. Thus, it is another awesome way to earn some money working with AI.
4. Selling AI model
You can create and sell AI models that helps solve problems, just like people create and sell softwares and websites. You can create general models, that works in a larger range of things, (such as an image classifier that says which animal is shown or a model that says whether the sentiment of a phrase was negative or positive), or personalized things that works in a more restricted domain (like a classifier of which dog race is shown or a classifier to say whether or not people are talking about your products in a newspaper).
5. Selling AI models on cloud services
The scale that cloud computing has taken, has made possible to deploy in online servers much more than a static website. Here you will be doing the same thing as above, but instead of selling the model to the company, you will deploy your software in a cloud server and charges the usage of it monthly or per demand. A lot of companies use this model, not so big ones like imagga and giants such IBM and Google.
6. Use AI to predict stock prices
You may use one service or use modern technics of data science and machine learning to develop a predictive analysis tool to help you determine when a price of a stock (or a cryptocoin) will raise or fall to determine to either buy or sell them and thus make some money of it. Actually, together with high frequency bots, this is the way that people who act in this field are working today.
7. Using AI to assist you creating something
You may also create or setup some AI software to assist you in creating some other thing that has not to do with AI. Generative tools are a good example, the project DreamCatcher , by Autodesk uses artificial inteligence to assist engineers to improve their projects. Also the project Magenta by Google aims to create art, such drawings and music, and may be a awesome tool for modern artists.
8. Create an AI based product
Probably the most obvious one. Create an end user product where one of the core values is AI based may be a great deal. Self driving cars, machine translation and speech recognition for example are heavily dependent upon AI advancements, but simpler things like chatbots, document analizers, security systems based on image recognition, image-descriptors for blind people or cleaning robots are also great to work with.
Artificial inteligence, despite the lot of advancements that have happened in the recent years and the awesome products that giants and startups are creating, is justing getting its first steps and there is so much to do and create on it. Joining this wave now may be a great opportunity to develop great things, earn money and contribute with the society progress.