Last year I made a remark about the crazy world we were living in, with “GenAI” this and “AI” that, including some weird experiences. But I have recently decided to “bite the bullet” and learn more about all this.
(Disclaimer: image generated by ChatGPT using the contents of this post as a prompt.)
I’m currently knee-deep in everything AI and Machine Learning, from both a technical and a business points of view:
- I’ve enrolled into the AI for Business Mini-MBA of Section, the education company founded by my longtime hero and NYU professor Scott Galloway. This course is by far one of the most eye-opening ones I’ve taken in a long, long time. I strongly recommend it.
- I completed the Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn Learning Path on LinkedIn Learning.
- I’m going through the Machine Learning Engineer Learning Path, and you can follow my steps as I move through the courses and labs.
- Finally, I’m reading Designing Machine Learning Systems by Stanford University professor Chip Huyen.
I’ve subscribed to a couple of newsletters around the subject, and unsubscribed from many others I had been reading for a long time:
I got myself a paid account on ChatGPT (to be able to use ChatGPT 4) and adopted Perplexity as my search engine of choice.
I also perused some interesting papers:
- Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (1950)
- Steps toward Artificial Intelligence by Marvin Minsky (1961)
- Minds, brains, and programs by John R. Searle (1980), known for the “Chinese room” argument.
- A theory of the learnable by L. G. Valiant (1984)
And some more recent ones:
- Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions
- Can I say, now machines can think?
- Code Generation with AlphaCodium: From Prompt Engineering to Flow Engineering
- Attention Is All You Need
- Principled Instructions Are All You Need for Questioning LLaMA-1/2, GPT-3.5/4
Finally, I got myself a ticket for the 4th UphillConf May 16th and 17th in Bern, Switzerland, which this year will be entirely dedicated to the subject of AI and ML1.
I was very skeptical of this whole AI thing until the end of last year. And I was for a long time. But the more I learned about it, the more I changed my mind. Yes, AI is wildly imperfect sometimes. Yes, it’s an absolute mess of startups all over the place. Yes, there are tons of open questions about the subject, from copyright to labor law to ethics. And yes, whatever output you get from it should be subject to scrutiny.
AI technology is here, and here to stay. I choose to learn more about it, and to see how we can use it in ethical, productive, and interesting ways. And there are plenty of AI models that can provide useful value right now.
I have the impression we’ve reached yet another huge paradigm shift in our industry and our society. Tom Scott was right. However, the phrase “Augmented Imagination” fits this new world much better than “Artificial Intelligence”.
Will you be there? Please let me know! ↩︎