One of the very few email newsletters I allow through my spam firewall is the one from Tomasz Tunguz.
In his latest email he talks about experience as a status symbol. As someone with roughly 20 years experience working with technology and the internet, the explosion of AI in the past year is one of several major waves of change I have encountered in that time.
The attention grabbing part of this post for me is about having “a compelling AI story” to remain competitive in your career.
It’s a cliché but adapting to change is crucial part of any career today.
I have experimented a lot with a variety of AI tools out there, it’s exciting, new and pretty complicated. There’s also a lot more nuance with the LLM flavour of AI than perhaps we’re used to expecting from technology, since it will lead you down rabbit holes of wrongness if you don’t pay attention.
My story is not going to be learning the depths of training LLMs though; understanding roughly how the technology works is enough for me. More important to my story is learning to exploit how it works for my benefit and the benefit of the company I work for.
My story is I have added AI into my daily workflow and use it for a range of tasks. It hasn’t replaced me and won’t do, but what it has done has been to turbo charge the things I can do.
It’s like another arm, or an intern. The breadth and depth of what I can do has significantly grown thanks to ChatGPT et al.
It doesn’t discount the need for experience though, experience is like a multiplying factor with AI, in that you know the right questions to ask, and you have a decent idea of how to detect bullshit.
So how to use AI as a story in your career? I guess it depends on how you want to begin it - is it a force multiplier or a threat? Are you an AI engineer or AI consumer? What about your use of AI is unique to you? Do you have your own agents? How do you communicate with AIs? What do you expect to get from using AI?