Developing An Intuition for Artificial Intelligence

If you are reading this, you are probably curious about Artificial Intelligence. It can be overwhelming trying to think about what is possible with AI and how you can better position yourself to minimize its negative effects on you or your business. Today, I will introduce a few mental models for thinking about what's possible with AI, how AI tools are likely to evolve, and how to develop an intuition for AI's capabilities, so you can better position yourself or your business for the future. Let's get started!

First of all, why should you care about any of this?

It is no longer a mystery that Artificial Intelligence is increasingly developing capabilities that will drive the cost of a lot of digital work toward zero. By "digital work", I mean anything that can be done on a screen. This realization can come with existential angst, as you question whether your job or business is safe. If you have had this thought or any other version of it, it can feel like the world is leaving you behind, or you are losing control over your future due to uncertainty, since AI could make your skillset, job, or business obsolete. Unsurprisingly, I believe AI will make some jobs, skill sets, and businesses obsolete, or at least drive down their costs so much that only the very top cohorts in those categories can continue to exist.

Do you know if your job or your business is one of them?

How certain are you that your skillset, job, or business will be in demand in the next 6 months?

Are you in the very top cohort of your skillset, job, or industry?

If you cannot answer any of these questions with certainty - I don't believe many people can - then I humbly submit that you should care about developing an understanding and intuition of the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. Having gone through these thought patterns myself in the last few months, I am here to offer a way to turn that angst into action - improvise, adapt, overcome.

Mental Models for the Post-ChatGPT World

Artificial Intelligence has existed for a long, long time. However, when most people talk about Artificial Intelligence in the present day, at least in the context of things like ChatGPT, they are talking about a specific subset of AI known as Generative AI (Gen AI).

Generative AI, as the name suggests, enables the generation of new content like text, music, images, and videos by specialized AI models. The models behind ChatGPT for instance, are Generative AI models that specialize in text generation and comprehension.

When thinking about what Gen AI is capable of and how that affects you or your business, it can be overwhelming to think about every instance of a capability like text, images, or video. Let's examine these capabilities from a different perspective, or at a higher level of abstraction, to help us think more clearly. Let's dive in. Here are 3 mental models for developing an intuition for AI.

1. AI as a Tool

Generative AI is a tool, like a computer or a calculator. Being afraid of a tool, or choosing not to use a tool, makes no sense. Do you cower at the sight of your smartphone when you try to use Google Maps to find directions? If you do, please seek professional help. No, seriously, you may have a problem I am nowhere near qualified to talk about. Okay, if you do not suffer from the aforementioned affliction, why would you be afraid of, or choose not to use AI? Embrace it as the tool it is. Wield it and bend it to your will.

Some may argue (I am) that tool use, much like the instinct to seek food and water, is an evolutionary imperative and is part of our humanness. Go forth and be human!

2. AI Thinking

An extension of viewing AI as nothing but a tool is “AI Thinking”. I use this term to capture the essence of thinking AI-first. In short, whenever you have a digital task i.e. anything you want to do on a computer or phone, pause and ask yourself "How can I use AI to make this easier”. This will feel strange at first and for the most part, you will not find a way to make AI help you with the task. However, the very act of thinking in this way starts to change your mindset about AI and makes you think AI-first. Once you start learning about different tools and capabilities (hopefully through this newsletter), your mindset will be placed perfectly to use the tools in an optimal way to improve your day-to-day or business tasks. Here's a flowchart to help improve your "AI Thinking”. Whenever you are about to perform a digital task, check on this chart. As a bonus, start tracking how many tasks per week you can complete with the help of an AI tool.

3. AI Intuition

Once you have started AI Thinking, how do you know what kinds of tasks AI can help you with? This is where having an intuition for what AI can do helps you gauge which tasks are good candidates to be automated and delegated. There are 4 content categories I like to think about when considering Gen AI capabilities: text, audio, video, and images. For each category, there are implications for being able to generate the content type, because those content types serve as the base for more complex capabilities. This is what I mean:

• If you can generate and comprehend text, you can generate code.

• If you can generate code, you can generate software.

• If you can generate software, you can generate specialized applications like accounting software (or even more AI. Yes, AI creating AI. Crazy right?).

Here's another example:

• If you can generate audio, you can generate music.

• If you combine your text generation with your audio generation, you can generate speech.

• If you can generate speech, you can express emotion.

Last example:

• If you can generate text, you can comprehend text.

• If you can generate and comprehend text, you can generate code.

• If you can generate and comprehend text, you can do basic mathematics.

• If you can generate code and do basic maths, you can perform tasks in Excel.

Do you see where this is going?

I should note here again that while this isn't exactly how Gen AI's capabilities are developed, it is a useful way to think about it, so you can start to develop an intuition. The map is not the territory.

Whenever you are practicing your AI Thinking before performing a digital task, think about these examples we just went through. It will feel unnatural at first, but the more you practice, the easier it becomes. For instance, if you are trying to create an Excel sheet with complex formulae for budgeting, think about the fact that AI can generate text. Therefore, it can generate numbers and formulae. Therefore it can generate code. Therefore it can probably be helpful to you for that task.

Conclusion

Today, we discussed how you can develop an intuition for AI’s capabilities by applying 3 mental models: Think about AI as a tool, think about how you can use AI whenever you are about to perform a digital task, and AI intuition, knowing the different kinds of digital tasks that can be automated by AI.

By practicing these mental models, you will start to wield AI as a tool, improving your productivity and ultimately outperforming everyone else who does not. You become more productive, giving you time back to focus on everything else. Time is the scarcest resource, don't spend it doing things you can delegate to AI. Until next week, happy prompting!

— Fauzi