Tips for a successful PhD in Artifical Intelligence
It’s not very different from other fields, really, except for the hype.

AI is super hot right now, and far too many works follow the line of: I found a dataset, trained a neural network on it, here’s the paper! (Preferably followed by a tweet/thoughtful Facebook post humblebragging about it)

It’s tiring, often unscientific, and most importantly- boring.

Focus on your fundamentals instead: be really good in math, theoretical foundations of CS, statistics, learning theory, optimization etc. 

This’ll buy you a toolkit that you can use long after the current AI hype dies down. 

Programming skills are good to have but should not be the focus. You can have undergraduate students do the coding (they’ll be happy to and at least in my case, they’d do a better job than me). All of the top AI people I know are not coders but theoreticians at heart.

The field is hyper competitive which means you’ll need to be ambitious and learn fast to shine. 

Soft skills matter. You need to learn how to present your work clearly, both in writing and orally.