I was a senior director of GenAI at Meta. I have 4 tips for breaking into AI — including whether you need a Ph.D. (www.businessinsider.com)

Devi Parikh, a former senior director of generative AI at Meta and now co-CEO of startup Yutori, shared four career lessons for breaking into AI: you don’t need a Ph.D. to do cutting‑edge work, stay professionally flexible, follow genuine interests, and see ideas through to completion. Parikh — who has a Ph.D. in computer vision and has moved from academia to FAIR, Meta, and now building AI agents for tasks like apartment hunting and shopping — stresses that a doctorate mainly matters for academic roles; industry labs and startups value hands‑on experience, model training expertise, and performance in coding and system‑design interviews. Technically, her advice highlights practical paths into ML: leverage open‑source code, side projects, and online communities to get experience with modern tools (she points to the deep‑learning wave and the shift from vision to multimodal/gen‑AI models driven by LLMs like ChatGPT). She warns against tying your identity to past toolsets or research areas and underscores follow‑through — completing projects end‑to‑end (her “Humans of AI” series raised her visibility). For practitioners and hires, the implication is clear: demonstrable engineering chops, adaptability to new architectures, and the discipline to finish projects often matter more than formal credentials.