Personally, I don't believe that confidence or even aptitude comes exclusively from putting in time. Like any other creative process, you can become better with practice, but you have to provide the passion and the drive. It's nice to set your sights on advanced subjects like AI development, but please remember that you'll have to walk before you run. That particular field of programming is fairly grassroots and proprietary at the moment, so you won't be able to find a lot of help with it in the form of samples and tutorials.
I'd highly recommend programming things that are particularly useful to you as you start out. Learning how to break down a problem, then coding a solution for each detail of that problem is very encouraging and rewarding!