Turning the Corner on AI

The context for AI has changed.

If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to read Something Big is Happening, by Matt Schumer.

It clearly explains the AI revolution taking place right in front of us. Here’s how the essay starts:

Think back to February 2020.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.

I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.

Once you read that, I’d encourage you to look at this webinar announcing Claude CoPilot (40 mins full speed—but you can get through it in ~15 if you really want to).

It starts with this statement (paraphrasing): “most people are using AI to ask questions; the people who are going to stand out are the ones who get it to do things.”

I am in the category of “good at using AI to ask questions, but I don’t use AI to do things.” That’s not where I want to be so I’m going to make a new, more concerted effort to cross the next chasm—and we’re holding an AI Hackathon at 60 Decibels next week to jump start our next phase of usage of these tools. According Boris Cherny at Anthropic (from the webinar), he has CoPilot doing his project management for him, and he used it to unsubscribe from a ton of services he wasn’t using. (I appreciated the honesty of his top two use cases).

AI isn’t going anywhere. If you sit near anyone whose job used to be writing code, you know that they’ve mostly stopped writing code and are now having AI tools do that work for them. Their leverage is 2-10x (and increasing).

That’s where we all could be.

And, as they say, the best time to jump in was 5 years ago, but the next best time is today.

(friendly reminder: for all of these tools, you want the paid version. It makes all the difference).