LLMs, What Skills to Learn? and What a Time to be Alive!
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AF: There are people that might be looking for their first job in AI. There are people who have been working in AI for a few years and they're asking themselves Is my job going to be automated. And there are also hiring managers that are putting together teams to build these kind of things, and they're thinking, what kind of a skills should I look for?
The question that all of the above have is: what kind of skills should I develop and what kind of skills should I monitor for?
AM: Yes, absolutely. I don't think that a lot of the people on this call will be automated away, for the foreseeable future, for a long time to come. I actually think this is the golden age for all of you. I think we need more coders; we need more people understand data; we need more people understand AI than ever before. The demand is only going to increase.
I think this is like when compilers were introduced for software development. The previous software engineers, it took 10 of them to do some very simple things. People brought along compilers eventually that says take these kind of low level instructions and abstract them into higher level languages, and they thought that's it. We don't need 10 people to write this simple code anymore, we're all going to lose our job. Instead, the marginal costs for paying for software development plummeted and the demand for software grew and grew and grew.
I think something similar is going to happen with AI skills. So definitely learn all those technical skills. Keep coding. Keep learning to teach your kids to code. I'm a big believer in that.
The skills that will make you stand out are always the same skills: can you work with people? Can you understand complex business problems? Can you problem solve? The most important one for me is, I think Barack Obama says it, can you do get stuff done? Are you a builder? Are you driven? Will you work with others and just solve problems?
If you can do those things, then I think the future is very bright. It's the time of the nerds. So keep nerding away.
AF: I've been going around saying that "learning to learn" is the most important skill going forward. That's the only thing you need to know, because anything you use is probably going to be out of fashion in a year.
AM: Exactly. There's a lot of doom and gloom about all this technology. These are important questions we should consider. What an amazing time to be alive. We should be really positive about this and we should just embrace it. This is the sort of stuff we read about in sci fi books, right? So let's embrace it, enjoy it, and use it to make cool things that help the world.