Some good thoughts on uses and direction.
The AI skills you MUST learn in 2023
Putting you ahead of the curve with real examples
By Ignacio de Gregorio
You won’t be substituted by AI, but you will be substituted by a human that knows how to leverage AI.
Same outcome, but a totally different course of action.
You shouldn’t fear AI by itself, but you should be shitting in your pants if you’ve seen ChatGPT and other Generative AI models and you haven’t started thinking how can you incorporate them into your daily work.
But you can start changing this as soon as… today, as the answer to this issue is known, and goes by the name of Prompting.
A skill so powerful that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it becomes a standard requirement in job descriptions in almost every industry, and an insanely valuable competitive edge over others if you harness its power.
Embrace or die
Mckinsey, the most prestigious consulting company in the world, sometimes referred directly to as ‘the Firm’, categorized economic activity more than ten years ago into three categories: production, transactions, and interactions.
Finally exploring the unexplored
For production, we all know how machines and robots have completely revolutionized how we generate products, and AI has helped by making these processes more efficient.
With transactions, digitalization, and more specifically, automation with technologies like RPA, are making them a much more streamlined process, with AI enabling the automation of more complex processes.
But until now, interactions were an untouched economic activity for AI, as the results of applying AI in these cases were, well… mild.
Generative AI has completely changed that.
Now, companies are completely confident that AI is going to take over how humans interact with others and with machines, and are ready to fully embrace it.
Thus, if that fact becomes a competitive advantage for your career or a complete burden, will depend ultimately on your capacity to learn this key skill.
This one will hit you close
Let’s see some examples of what I mean:
Many writers, especially newspapers, are already generating a considerable part of their writings using AI and then editing it using humans.
Marketers are generating impressive copy using AI, or leveraging the model’s ample knowledge for idea brainstorming
Companies are already rethinking how ChatGPT can be used for the automation of complex tasks before considered impossible to automate, with action transformers already making an appearance
Companies are also studying ways to how ChatGPT can revolutionize customer service with tailored chatbot solutions
But Generative AI isn’t only impacting how humans perform their day-to-day work, it’s also going to impact how companies operate.
Internet-native companies will become AI-native
Microsoft, by acquiring a majority stake in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT or DALL-E, has recently announced the inclusion of ChatGPT into Azure, its cloud computing service.
This is a huge deal, as it allows any company using Microsoft’s cloud services to easily leverage ChatGPT into their systems.
But that isn’t enough for Microsoft.
They also are embedding ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing, and to all its Office365 software suite. Yes, your PowerPoints, Excels, or your Words, among others, will also leverage ChatGPT to enhance your experience.
Needless to say, ordinary people don’t realize what’s coming, and, for that reason, many of them will quickly miss this life-changing opportunity I’m presenting to you today.
Because striving for the continuous reinvention of your skills is a must in the tech-driven world we happen to live in.
You shouldn’t feel tempted to embrace AI, you should be feel forced to do so.
The impact of AI on our daily interactions will be so huge that lots of AI-based jobs will surge as demand for AI experts will soar.
And by experts I don’t mean AI researchers or scientists; simply people that have become experts in applying these technologies.
And that leads you to Prompting.
But what on Earth is this?
Learning to speak to AI
To understand how powerful a skill prompting will be, we need a quick summary of what Generative AI actually is.
AI is a transformer, but not the way you think it is
Generative AI models are models that, when receiving a text prompt, give an output related to that input, be that an image, written text, spectrograms, or others, depending on the use case.
These AI models, at least the most successful ones, fall into the category of Large Language Models, transformer models that use an attention mechanism to work.
In layman’s terms, these models are capable of understanding context from inputs in a much more efficient way using this attention mechanism, which allows them to understand the context and what parts of the input matter the most. This makes these models much more memory-efficient than past models.
But this raises a question. How do we teach context to AI models?
The answer to this question is text embeddings, the hidden power behind ChatGPT and other generative models.
