Welcome to Advantageous Insights - on AI

"Advice, news, thoughts and wisdom on health, wealth, mind, self, technology, and AI. But mostly AI."

Welcome to Advantageous Insights - on AI

I am here to share advice, news, thoughts, and wisdom about things that interest me and that can help us all live better lives - health, wealth, mind, technology, science business, society, and AI. But mostly AI."

The AI pun in the title is intentional. There will be a lot about AI - artificial intelligence - on Advantageous Insights, so if that’s your thing, sign up. I won’t promise it will be only about that, as I have some hopefully useful and helpful things to share about a range of topics, but let me explain why I will focus on AI and related technologies.

The Decade of AI

First, it’s interesting that the term AI describes what it’s not, rather than what it is. Calling it AI - artificial is like calling the internal-combustion-driven vehicle the “horseless carriage”. But what does AI really mean for us? Researchers have been working on artificial intelligence since the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s, and for much of it, progress was slow enough that many could reasonably declare that ever getting to AGI (artificial general intelligence) was impossible. Breakthroughs in the early 2000s that made neural nets finally practical, and then the famous image recognition result in 2012 kicked off the deep learning revolution, that in the past decade has accelerated to the point where we now have super-powerful generative AI models and Large Language Models (LLMs), that are powerful foundational models for a broad set of use cases.

This AI is delivering for us: Automated speech recognition, generation and translation to text or other languages; automated image recognition; automated generation of creative products - images, poems, essays, art; and so much more. As AI and AGI, it’s Automated Insights and Automated Generative Intelligence.

This is the Golden Age and the Cambrian Explosion era of AI. What is possible now based on the scaling and power of current models dwarfs what was possible just a few years prior. I’ve been in technology since my youth in the 1970’s, and we’ve never in the whole computer / PC / internet / smartphone / IoT eras seen anything like this. It’s remarkable that in the first month of chatGPT’s launch late last year, over 100 million users tried it. What few are mentioning or contemplating is that however good these models are now, there will be yet more powerful and capable models to come. It’s still early innings, and this decade, the 2020s, will be seen as the decade of AI, as its power pervades so many aspects of what we do and how we work.

Community and Content

The speed of change, the importance of the trends, and the technical depth and challenge of what is actually happening all points to the need for on-point, timely, and technically correct content on AI. Not hype, fluff, hand-wringing and vagueness, but actionable and helpful advice, thoughts and insights on what’s going on: Advantageous Insights.

I will be posting multiple times per week. As someone who has a PhD in Computer Science with a career in software development - I’ve been a machine learning engineer, worked on a data science team, been a VP of engineering and CTO for various small startups - I could definitely ‘geek out’ and focus on the engineering and technology part of AI. The research in AI these days is fascinating and amazing and driving this massive shift. That’s a part of what I want to share, and so if you are a data scientist, AI practitioner, or in any job or field adjacent to that, join me.

However, I also hope to share insights for those that are in a more general audience of people interested in AI, the non-techies either wanting to use and leverage AI in their own work, or simply wanting to know what’s going on to prepare for the seismic shifts to come. All business leaders and professionals need to familiarize themselves with the ever-advancing landscape of AI research, application development, and use in business and personal lives. You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

I hope that this newsletter / substack blog / forum becomes a vibrant one, so please check me out frequently and share it with others. Please comment and let me know what questions you would like answered. I’ll try to answer it.