How LLMs Transformed my Life and Vision

ChatGPT burst onto the scene on November 30, 2022, sending shockwaves through the tech industry and beyond. ChatGPT Wrapper Startups were born left right and center. When I first encountered it on my YouTube feed in December, curiosity got the better of me. My inaugural question? Did it know who I was?

Did it get it right? Nope. Was I impressed? Absolutely. I was hooked. The next few hours flew by as I bombarded it with questions. While it stumbled on factual accuracy, its uncanny ability to understand and respond naturally was mind-blowing. This was clearly NOT your run-of-the-mill, rule-based chatbot.

Just months before ChatGPT's debut, I was knee-deep in the world of NFTs. It was there that I first encountered DALL-E 2, experimenting with its ability to generate images from text prompts. Little did I know that the same underlying technology powering DALL-E 2 was about to revolutionize text generation with ChatGPT.

I was in the middle of building a website at that time and I quickly tasked it with not only generating copy for the website, but also to quickly generate images to fill certain sections. Suddenly, the usual stress of writing and visualizing melted away. I could focus on design and layout while AI handled the content creation. It was a game-changer.

My relationship with my tools as a frontend developer shifted dramatically. By March 2023, GitHub Copilot entered the scene, and my relationship with coding transformed overnight. Code completion beyond IntelliSense became a reality. The next day, I pestered my CTO and colleagues. Soon, our entire team had embraced this new era of human-AI collaboration.

The impact on my work output was staggering. In the six years from 2017 to 2022, I completed an average of 10 projects annually, totaling 59 projects.

From 2023 onwards:

In just 1.5 years since embracing AI tools, I've tackled 28 projects – a 50% increase in yearly productivity. Although it could be argued that I was able to work on more projects because I was more experienced, I would argue that the AI tools I had at my disposal had a significant impact on my productivity because troubleshooting and learning new frameworks / libraries was now 10x easier. Especially, especially in helping me understand the world of backend and working with LINUX servers.

Whether or not LLMs are reaching a point of diminishing returns, the fact remains that AI is here to stay. Just a few days ago Claude Sonnet 3.5 was released and it has once again broke all evals, surpassing other Open and Closed source models. It has only been less than 2 years since ChatGPT was launched. We now have a sneak peek of text to video generation Sora, empathetic conversational AI, a coding model fluent in 80+ programming languages Codestral, Image generation that can properly write Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, and so much more. These don't even touch on all the advancements in hardware, and how they will enable use cases that were previously impossible.

The AI revolution is reshaping every industry at breakneck speed. As someone with an innate curiosity for organizational processes, I've found myself constantly asking, "How can AI help me do this better?"

Every vertical is ripe for disruption. Not everyone will need a chatbot. Not everything will need a new product. But,

This shift in thinking led me to a profound realization. My career goals have evolved from simply creating impactful products to a more fundamental question:

This transformation didn't happen overnight. It emerged from countless interactions with AI tools, observing their potential to democratize knowledge and capabilities. I realized that ensuring everyone can benefit from these advancements is crucial for a fair and prosperous future.

The rapid advancement of AI threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities. Those able to leverage AI effectively will gain significant advantages, potentially widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. The question of how to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared equitably amongst all will be a challenge that we will have to face head on.

Malicious actors who have always been one step ahead of the game will now have even more tools at their disposal to cause harm and exfiltrate both information and resources from those that are not prepared.

The longer we hesitate to adopt and adapt to AI, the further behind we'll fall. The time for action, learning, and change is now.

The world of AI is vast and complex, and it cannot be learned overnight. After a few months of exposure to Large Language Models (LLMs), I began to delve deeper into the technology behind them. The 2017 paper, "Attention is All You Need", authored by researchers at Google, is widely recognized as a pivotal work that marked a significant shift towards a new generation of machine learning techniques with the introduction of the Transformer architecture.

It wasn't something I could easily comprehend, but after having conversations with different groups of people from different disciplines, reading up different versions or interpretations that the concept slowly started to make sense. Even so, I didn't need to understand the intricacies of the technology to be able to use it effectively.

As a builder, my primary interest is in seeing how receptive people are to new processes and how they respond to new stimuli. Will their eyes glimmer with excitement or will they be filled with dread?

In this past 1.5 year, I've observed a shift in the way I introduce change into people's lives. I used to just share something, demonstrate it, and then hope that they will pick it up. At most, I would only just bring it up twice. Today, if I see an obvious benefit of a new tool or process to an individual, irrespective of whether or not they are close to me. I will:

It's pushy, but I care for them and I want them to succeed. In the littlest way possible, I want them to be prepared for the future that is coming. Parents that are not tech-savvy and not equipped to help their children navigate the non conforming digital citizens of this digitalscape, will unfortunately face the brunt of my pushiness. I just want them to step up and be prepared for the future that is coming.

In a world trending towards national self-interest and protectionism, I foresee challenges in maintaining equitable access to fundamental rights like energy, water, food, shelter, education, healthcare, and security.

Every human being should have access to these however, equitable value extraction and derivation from all of those rights will require each and every one of us to have an AI companion or co-pilot. Our potential is no longer just a product of our own abilities, but also a product of the AI companion that we have at our disposal.

Knowledge is Power.

Remember, in this new era, there's simply no more excuse for,

The resources are at your fingertips, seize them.