India, Dec. 8 -- An Indian-origin artificial intelligence expert who spent over 15 years in research, academia and big tech has shared practical lessons for young professionals hoping to build a career in AI.

In an interview with Business Insider, Devi Parikh, a former senior director of generative AI at Meta and the co-CEO of an AI startup, stressed that a PhD is no longer a prerequisite for cutting-edge work in the field.

Parikh, 41, who lives in San Francisco, said her interest in AI began in the early 2000s when she studied electrical and computer engineering in college and was introduced to pattern recognition. She went on to complete a PhD in computer vision at Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, years before large language models...