Help for a PM with a technical background to improve AI skills

Hey,

I’m looking for some advice related to improving my skills in AI. I am currently a product manager in a tech company and, like the rest of the world, we have pivoted to using AI for a whole set of things.

I’m looking to improve my knowledge of Generative (and other forms of cutting edge) AI so that I am better able to understand how it can be used for products, as well investigate frontier use cases. Although I have a technical background in AI from my university days, that was over 15 years ago and obviously the world has changed dramatically since then. But given that I’ve continued to keep doing AI courses since then, I still have enough knowledge of a lot of AI basics, and I don’t see anything more another course Coursera or Udacity course or two would teach me.

So how do I best approach this, apart from just reading regular articles on the topic? I have a few thoughts, but would like everyone’s opinion:

1. Do a master’s in AI, but I’ve been looking at some of the best universities and they still spend 80% of the time teaching fundamentals that I already know (machine learning, neural nets, etc).
2. A PhD would be more interesting, but I am happy at my job and don’t want to leave it, and I don’t know if any reputed universities offer a part time PhD or research degree in AI (does anyone know?)
3. Regularly read research papers and apply learnings from it to my work. This sounds interesting, but I don’t know of good sources where I can get the best of latest research papers, or have discussions around it. Does anyone know?
4. Join community of active researchers and developers in GenAI. Thing is I’m in Asia, outside of the physical locations in Europe and US where such groups likely exist. And the ones here are not of a high calibre. Does anyone know of online forums I can join (besides this one)?
5. Start developing and experimenting with GenAI products (eg. build GPTs on OpenAI’s GPT store). However, this is a large time commitment, and I’m worried about potential conflict with my current employment. Maybe I could do that without a profit motive, but even then, I wouldn’t know how to bootstrap something like this. Any advice on guides or communities developing AI tools as a hobby would be useful.

I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and of any other ideas that I may not have thought of. Thank you so much everyone!