I wish could done it your way. My journey was rather haphazard but one I'm proud of none the less. Sorry for the confusion, I studied creative writing in college. I initially gained most of my tech skill volunteering to build websites for non-profits and self study and eventually got a masters degree. Most of my job came from being able to sit at the intersection of business and technical teams since I was communicate relatively well about technical to non-technical audiences.

Working with applied AI problems also showed many of the limitations of the current research. I felt there was opportunities to move the needle on fundamental research through applying to more complex problems.

As for leaving industry, it a mixture of motivations. Most my of experience in AI is through applied work and self learning. I really wanted to build a strong theoretical foundation so I could have to ability to solve more complex problems that I saw in our startups. The second was intellectual curiosity and passion. I'm fascinated by words, NLP and AI. I love storytelling and find it fascinating that our experiences both socially and with reality are mediated through language. In many ways working on NLP and AI has made think deeply about how we use language to communicate and be humans. Finally, I'm I kind lucked in opportunities to do deep learning research without a phd and formal training. This really isn't replicable outside of the startup space as most ML/AI research requires a phd.