How can I get involved in AI? And how do I know if I’m a crackpot?

I came up with some ideas for AI and I wanted to know how to proceed. I’ve already read the research papers I could find and I see nothing about these ideas in the papers, but I’m sure someone has done my ideas because people are smarter than me and I’m sure they must have had the same ideas. But my ideas are too new to be implemented yet, so I’d like to do them myself. I’m not an indie researcher because I’m doing this for the sake of my community and my community is not funding me, so I’m not sure if I’m an indie or not. If I’m an indie researcher, how do other people like you fund yourself? I’m not learning Haskel, so I can’t use cabal. I’ve tried to learn python and I was frustrated that I couldn’t get anything done quickly. Sometimes I really want to work in Julia but I don’t know how to do that. When I look at research papers, I see that 75% of the paper is gibberish to me. Should I learn more math? I don’t know what math to learn or where to get started. How do I know if my ideas are crackpot ideas? Or if they’re even good ideas? I’ll be sad if I waste years of my life on an idea that doesn’t even work. If anyone knows what I’m going through, please tell me what I should do. I’d be open to talking about it in private messages to release a bigger discussion here.