# No AI background here — how did things start to make sense for you?

> Source: <https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/no-ai-background-here-how-did-things-start-to-make-sense-for-you/172646#post_8>
> Published: 2026-06-30 21:42:50+00:00

Take Dr. Ng’s Machine Learning Specialization course from Deeplearning.ai. It’s a gentle intro to a somewhat mathematically brutal subject (I’m a math dummy. Like, bad.) but even without a strong math background you will really get a sense of the underlying “how it works” of AI. The course is like $40. He’s a good teacher and it’s take-it-till-you-pass. The labs are tough without a python background but that’s OK-you’ll learn a little bit about python along the way (they give you the answers so no need to learn coding).

I’m still blown away by the fact that y=mx+b I had to learn in high school algebra is a fundamental underlying equation of AI. If I’d known that it was actually going to be USEFUL someday I might have paid attention