Started learning AI, aiming to switch jobs in 6–8 months. Is this the right time? Would love your thoughts!

Talking like someone who’s never used AI. It is without a doubt the next big thing. It’s still in a transitory phase where people are experimenting with its application. I would encourage you to watch the Google IO 2025 from 2 weeks ago. It’s a long video, I’m sure you will find atleast 3 things that are useful to you right now or you can see someone else extending their tech on. I can see it eating away 2 more jobs (non tech don’t worry) just looking through that 2 hr video.

As far as OPs question, I would say yes do learn it if you want to! I am trying to as well. But today’s Transformer based AI models are an evolution more than 40 years in the making. So you need to learn a lot of math, ML and deep learning to get there. So it’s ofcourse tough. This is just my understanding from being in tech since long and talking to some real ML engineers. An ML engineer friend of mine once said, that the GPT3 launch in 2023 was unexpectedly good and completely new tech for them - the waterfall transformer architecture. And that made a lot of progress people in other branches of ML had made obsolete. Some real innovation. That coming from an ML engineer was shocking to me.

So yes, I would say go ahead and learn AI. Take it one step at a time, pivot as much and soon as you need, or even end courses or learning if it’s not serving you. And stay updated on the industry.