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30 Things I’ve Learned About AI
After 8 years of studying and writing about it
3 min readOct 2, 2024
- To know if an AI tool works, don’t read news headlines — try it yourself
- Even if an AI bubble explodes, the survivors will build a new technological landscape; and as a second-order effect, a new sociocultural landscape as well
- AI won’t take your job, a person using AI will; most likely you using AI will replace yourself not using it
- Companies care about shareholders, politicians care about votes, journalists care about paychecks, bloggers care about views, and researchers care about citations. Find the right mix of sources for what you care about
- Generative AI is in its final stage, what comes next isn’t valuable for what it generates but for what it doesn’t
- AI isn’t the technology “of the future” but of the past and the present; we just don’t call it AI once we use it in everyday life
- AI requires regulation, but not at the expense of innovation
- Some people saw coming a decade ago what’s happening today; follow them and you’ll see (part of) the future
- In AI, everything (even the name), is and isn’t marketing at the same time
- Those who over-hype in the extreme and those who anti-hype in the extreme are often cut from the same cloth
- In times of turmoil and controversy, listen to the quiet ones; the rest are picking sides to build their identity
- Studying the underlying math of neural networks gives you insights you can’t acquire elsewhere
- Unless you’re good at making predictions, actual results from the field will catch you off guard one year from now (even months from now) — reflect on your surprise
- AI won’t always be this cheap — this period was a welcome anomaly
- Seriously trying out AI tools has a negligible cost to you but an incredible potential upside; the only people who purposefully don’t do it are those too invested in discrediting — and even tearing down — the AI edifice
- GPT-5 will be surprisingly good; you can’t anticipate technology that’s being invented as we speak
