You can work within a niche domain or an applied industry, for which ML/AI is just another tool in the bag (admittedly: sometimes revolutionary, many other times irrelevant); or you may want to do bleeding-edge research, only to find that you just cannot compete against the top dogs (even the wonderful fast.ai couldn’t follow suit without refactoring heavily every six or twelve months). What’s the point, then? Set yourself a clearly interesting and achievable target (learn and find a job, get a paper published, release an applied library, etc.) and a challenging deadline with milestones (say, 3-6-9-12 months). After that, wrap up and move forward or move on.