AI tip of the week:
Last week was Microsoft’s Ignite conference, in Chicago. Jeremiah attended virtually, and wanted to get an idea of some of the most interesting sessions (many of which were captured on video). There are MANY, MANY sessions, and even though the session catalog was useful, learning how to navigate would be a course in and of itself!
So he used this prompt in his favorite LLM. “please make me a markmap of all of the sessions from this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference. I’d like information as a table, with working links to each session.” Your results will vary – feel free to play around with it! One hero was able to a pretty slick image using an LLM (we put it at the bottom of this post because it’s MASSIVE). Happy AI-ing!
Hey friend!
AI is new and constantly evolving. Daily. Parts of it are super technical. The kind of math with those random Greek characters.
Confession time: For a while in all this chaos we used to feel like maaaaaaaaybe we didn’t know what we’re doing. A good bit of the time.
Oh hello Imposter Syndrome! Nice to see you again!
Ever happen to you? At times, do you also feel like you’re impostering in the AI verse?
Raise your hand if one of these resonates:
“There was a MISTAKE! I’m here because I slipped in UNDER THE RADAR!”
“I’m not as good as the people around me.”
“Oh, that good thing that happened to me? DUMB LUCK. I was in the right place at the right time.”
Our favorite?
“Any moment now, someone is going to point at me and shout YOU ARE SO NOT QUALIFIED TO BE HERE!”
Has your hand gone up? (This works better in a crowded room, but trust us – all the hands around you would be up, too.) We’ve seen it.
Imposter Syndrome can happen to anyone.
Almost everyone has had it at some point–ESPECIALLY successful people. About 70% of people suffer from imposter Syndrome at some point or another.
Want to know something else? It’s curable. We’ll show you how.
Story time.
ChatGPT launched on Nov 30, 2022. Chaos spread throughout the land. Microsoft started dropping AI “Copilots.” What are these, even?!
Dona, a C++ dev working on Accessibility at the time, felt a bit overwhelmed by all the Copilots falling out of the sky. She needed to make sure her longtime enterprise customers – including customers with disabilities – could actually use them.
Jeremiah studied Computer Science and computational linguistics back in college. Decided not to go for a PhD. Went instead into an exciting 20 year tech career. The deeper he gets into AI, the more he realizes that building AI systems more responsibly can best help customers all over the world.
Each of us followed a similar strategy to learn within the AI-verse. Dona wrote this process down long ago (and wrote a book about it). It’s called the “Imposter Syndrome Banishing Spell.”
Now it’s your turn to apply the Banishing Spell to your own situation. Get vulnerable and ask yourself the following questions:
1) What am I feeling unqualified to do? In Dona’s case, it was all of the Machine Learning stuff, the new terms for everything. In Jeremiah’s, it was getting back into a field he’d not touched for a bit.
2) What are the realistic expectations? Dona didn’t know how to do ML properly (apart from a few random experiments). She’d been a C++/C# dev all these years – it’s realistic that she wasn’t an ML expert. Jeremiah didn’t know about many of the new developments in building AI systems responsibly. Not only had capabilities evolved over the years, ways of causing harm – and mitigating those harms – had too.
3) What will I lose out on if I don’t tackle this issue? This is a very cool industry. Both of us want to focus here for the next many years. If we don’t go deep NOW, we’ll miss out on one of the great opportunities of our time. Plus we want to remain employed, thanks!
4) Which parts AM I qualified to do? Both Dona & Jeremiah are qualified to read through the docs, and build tech things. We can both speak on our topics, and teach others what we’ve learned. We’ve both been doing this for decades.
5) Which parts are we NOT qualified to do? For Dona, the deep stats of machine learning, plus training her own models from scratch. For Jeremiah, same, plus he’s not a lawyer – both of which are hugely useful in Responsible AI.
6) Who is qualified to do what you are not? Our colleagues Seth Juarez, Jennifer Marsman, and Sarah Bird are three people who do this AI work for a living and always have.
7) How did the qualified people learn? What can you do as a first step? Well, Jennifer, Seth and Sarah all studied Machine Learning and have done this model-training business for decades. But for us, we took the free, online Intro to Machine Learning training at DeepLearning.ai. That course is a good first step to learning how AI models are even trained, which is what we needed.
8) How can I do a small experiment? For Dona, it was first learning and sharing defintions with her team. Then it was using basic AI tools to do some design experiments for her fashion line (Prima Dona Studios). That experiment resulted in customers telling her they preferred her ORIGINAL designs versus AI ones. Noted. Her second experiment was designing a wine menu to pair with the food menu at the bar she co-owns (Side Hustle). That one worked and people loved the summer wine choices! For Jeremiah, his first experiment was building an assistant to help him answer frequent questions he got from consulting with his small business owners (Boxes & Foxes). His second is building a small tool to help learn tech skills (aka “Code Bingo”). Both participated in local AI hackathons to see what kinds of problems they could tackle.
9) What advice would I give a friend? Write that down, then do the thing. Another life hack is to go to your favorite LLM (we use copilot.microsoft.com a lot for this one) – and brainstorm with it! “Hi, I’m a product leader who wants to learn more of the technical details of how to implement RAI principles, and to implement them in code. What resources should I learn more about? Please cite sources.”
10) Create My Own Category. When Dona started studying AI, she was working in Accessibility. She was not the foremost expert in the world in Accessibility nor was she the foremost expert in the world on AI. HOWEVER, she was one of very few people looking at how AI could be used as an Assistive tech tool! One of the fastest ways to become a go-to expert in a given field, is to figure out what your niche is. Best can be to make up your own category. You might not be the best at X. You might not be the best at Y. But you are the ONLY (or few) at X AND Y TOGETHER.
11) Be Known in the Industry. Both Dona and Jeremiah share their work and what they are working on LinkedIn in real time. If you are not comfortable doing this, share your work with a small group. Write a private or public blog. These are all your resume and it will be very very cool to look back at where you started – to appreciate the progress you made.
12) Create A Secret Society. Wherever you can, bring together people from other disciplines who are ambitious and hard-working and decide you will learn AI together. Form a Textable Team and share wins & challenges. Grow powerful together!
There you go! The spell to banish your impostering in the AI space. We’d love to hear if any of these steps resonated for you.
If you need help with any of these steps OR want to meet others who are also doing the thing, our Become an AI Power User workshop on December 13th might be useful to you. You can find out more here.
Thank you and let’s banish imposter syndrome together!
💗Dona and Jeremiah
