21-Year-Old Cook Self-Taught AI for 3 Years, Lands $84.5K Director Job
bralynn2222 · reddit · 2026-08-08
A 21-year-old shares their journey from having no degree and working as a backline cook to becoming a Director of AI and Systems Development (earning $84.5K/year) in just three years.
- Early Days: Started by adding knowledge to early LLMs (Vicuna, LLaMA) and handcrafting reasoning datasets, quickly learning that data quality beats quantity.
- Breakthrough: Spent six months building Python datasets and released pydevmini-1, which achieved SOTA Python coding capabilities at the time. This led to an (unpaid) role at Tesslate.
- Monetization: Launched an AI consulting firm, using Google Ads and LinkedIn to find clients and averaging $3,000/month.
- Outcome: A repeat client hired them full-time as a remote Director. The entire journey was powered by self-study and a single RTX 3090 GPU after work hours.
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