You Ask, I Answer: How Do You Keep Up With AI?

In this episode, let's answer Kristen's question. How are you managing to keep up with everything that's happening in AI? The answer to this question is twofold. One, uh, keeping up with it is easier for me because I enjoy it. I legitimately enjoy seeing what's new, playing with all the new toys, etc., uh, understanding the technology, determining how it works.

For me, it's as much a hobby and pastime as it is a profession. Uh, if you were to ask me to keep up with, say, regulatory changes, it would be a lot harder for me to stay up to date on that because that's not my that's not my cup of tea. I don't enjoy that. Um, so that's part of it is keeping up with something. If you enjoy it, it'll be a lot easier to stay motivated, to stay interested in the topic.

The second thing is having a sense of what belongs in your kitchen. So, what I mean by this, if you go to any major store, go to like IKEA, right? And you go into the kitchen section, there's huge numbers of everything, you know, pots and pans and uh utensils and appliances and all this stuff. And you look around, you go, what of this stuff do I actually need? The answer to that question is going to be contingent on your cooking skills, the amount of space you have, the kinds of things you like to cook, um, and uh whether you even know what some of the things are, right?

You'll pick up this one thing, it's like, oh, this got all sorts of attachments and things, not really sure what to do with it. That is a good analogy for AI tools, right? There's gonna be a whole bunch of tools and categories of things that you probably aren't gonna need, right? When you see someone announcing a new way to do model quantization. Are you really going to be doing that?

Because if you're not, then you can probably safely ignore um news about model quantizate quantization. If you are refocusing on generating images and video, probably what's happening with large language models, you don't need to keep as up to date on that. Now there's some things like prompt engineering that I do believe a lot of people will need more at least general skills with, in the same way that you need general skills with like a word processor and a spreadsheet, right? If you're not in accounting or finance, you probably aren't going to know the advanced functions of Microsoft Excel, but you probably should at least know how to like add cells together. The same is true for prompt engineering.

But all the the announcements and the hustle and the hype of what's happening in AI right now, some of it is relevant, some of it is not. And what determines relevance is determined by what you need it to do and what are your use cases. If you are running a manufacturing floor and you are uh looking for a way to uh reduce defects on the manufacturing line, something like the tools and computer vision, that's gonna be real relevant for you because you're gonna be using uh machine-based image recognition to spot defects. Again, should something like stable diffusion and generative AI be the top of your list of things to keep up on? Probably not.

It's probably not gonna make as big a difference for your productivity. So the things to keep in mind when you're seeing this flood of AI news coming at you is is this relevant to what I want to do? Is this relevant to what I'm trying to do? And if the answer is no, you now know how to filter that to say, you know what, I don't need to pay attention to this entire subject area, at least not what's on the cutting edge. Think about the bell curve, right?

You have your early adopters, your your cutting edge, your early adopters, your mainstream, your laggards, and then your Luddites. Sort of the five phases of the bell curve. In areas that impact your industry, yeah, you want to probably be an early adopter, maybe even cutting edge. In areas that don't impact your industry, you can be solidly mainstream or even a laggard because it's just not something that is super important. For example, I pay almost no attention to autonomous vehicles to self-driving cars.

I I look for you know what's available in market, but I'm not paying attention to that news because it's not relevant to what I do, it's not something I'm personally interested in, and uh it's just not something that interests me as much as what you can do with large language models. So that's my answer. You keep up with it based on what you want to have in your kitchen, and then you ingest, you take in the stuff that's in those areas, and you for the rest you just kind of park until it becomes more mainstream. Thanks for the question, and I'll talk to you next time. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.