I can relate 👋 For me AI (and we used to write it “Ai”back then) was a big dream of my youth, a projection of the future(s) to come.. I think I’ve never posted my story on Twitter and this is maybe the right thread to do it :) 1985: First time I heard about Artificial Intelligence was by a Byte (US) Magazine article back in 1985 (as a 19yo student of Mathematics and CS) I was so excited and I was obsessed with the idea of being able to store the human knowledge on computers via AI, that I didn’t care about anything else. I became extremely unease and didn’t want to continue my studies in Maths. I wanted to study AI! My life was already changed. I bought some really expensive for my pocket AI books from UK and discovered that one of the top UNIs to go for AI was @EdinburghUni 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🫶 I had to drop off my maths degree in Greece and work my a** off to fund a new life abroad! My family couldn’t afford the money for me to study 4 years in UK (we were not allowed back then to carry more than a few hundred pounds in currency abroad - stupid Banking restrictions of the 80s) So I worked hard for another 4 years (1985-89) as a young developer, also selling computers and earning the funding of full 4 years studies and life in UK. I had to go through new exams process and managed to get to Edinburgh University AI department for a new undergraduate Join degree in AI/CS. 1989: When I landed in Edinburgh and started the first year of AI studies I was sure that we could change the world! It took me a while to realize that things were not as I had imagined them so I gave myself the chance to learn more things and collect as much knowledge about other technologies too while I was there. This was possible because Eduni was (and still is ) such an amazing University with a great culture and it was excelling in many areas Computer Science, Microelectronics, Biology (Dolly 🐑), Life Sciences etc. 1993: When I finished my AI/CS degree I was already an expert in many new things like Computer Networks, the early Internet, LINUX and I started planning for my first company which I started in 1995 with the name “expert.sys” 😉 which combined my love for expert systems and neural networks and a windows filename with a sys extension 😂😂😂 The next two+ decades were what we call now a lifelong learning process and an entrepreneurial journey of twenty-something years in the dull world of IT in Europe 🐌 2013: ten more years of combined Startup experience in US with the vision (again) to capture and augment knowledge from meetings and collaboration (pic) 2023 (30 years later) I am now restarting my dream for AI to become a part of every knowledge worker’s backpack 🎒 so I can indeed help millions to achieve more and be safer in the future AI landscape Lesson : Never stop believing in your dream! Stay hungry, stay foolish ❤️ You just have to gather experiences, fail a couple of times, learn from your mistakes and meet great people in the way And if what you were dreaming is still an unfixed problem and an unmet need, you can retry fixing it 😀