AI Shows Us How Much Can Change in 3 Months

It's Feb 14th, and just in time for Valentines Day,  AI Career Boost is officially three months old! Since its launch in November, it has been a whirling dervish of a ride, both for the company and AI in general. No one could have forecast the overwhelming attention OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's competitor, Bard, would bring to what's possible with Generative Text AI - just the first of what are sure to be more mind-blowing AI advances in 2023. In response, more people than ever are interested in careers in AI, and we're doing our best to keep up with the need!

In today's newsletter we'll outline our upcoming learning opportunities, including:

• a new Conversational AI course taught by Polly Allen and Rupa Chaturvedi starting Feb 27th
• the Product Management for Machine Learning session at Product Camp Vancouver on March 4th (vote for this session here if you'll attending!).

More details for each are provided below. We'll finish off with a new Q&A section 'Ask and AI Insider' where we demystify some of the hype surrounding ChatGPT. Got a question you'd like ask for a future newsletter? Send us an email and we'll do our best to answer as many as we can!

Stay tuned for our next update in two weeks when we'll have a special announcement about upcoming second cohort of our 6-week AI Career Accelerator, plus more workshops, including a FREE workshop on non-tech career paths in AI. We're excited to have you join!

Ciao for now,

Polly Allen & your friends at AI Career Boost  

New Course for UX Designers, Product Managers, Startup Founders and More!

I'm beyond excited to partner with both Rupa Chaturvedi (Senior Design leader at Google, ex-Alexa AI, ex-Stanford Design Lab) and the Maven platform on week-long this course. 

This course is intended for UX or product designers, product managers, startup founders or even just AI enthusiasts looking to learn from industry experts how to conceive, design and build successful conversational AI products. There's no technical background required - and yes, we'll cover how ChatGPT is one of the many options you should consider!

With Maven, all courses are delivered live, in person (instead of a bunch of videos) and we'll get the chance to deep dive into your use case or project with personalized advice.

Enrollment will open shortly for our second cohort starting in March, after our first cohort sold out more quickly than expected (4 days!). Add yourself to the waitlist to be the first to know when registration opens. Feel free to email with any questions to be sure the course is the right fit for you.

ProductCamp Vancouver - vote for the sessions you want to hear today!

ProductCamp Vancouver will be taking place in person at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC on March 4th. Tickets to this exciting in-person event are free - and while they're already sold out, it's not too late to join the waitlist! This 'unconference' asks participants to vote for proposed sessions, so the group chooses which topics to learn about. If you're attending and like to hear more about Product for Machine Learning projects, up-vote the session proposal here.

So...what is an 'AI Career Accelerator', anyway? 

We've gotten this question a few times so thought it is a great time to clarify! It's a six-week combination of content, coaching and community designed to get you the knowledge, confidence and career skills to level up in your career by learning to build and apply AI. Our first cohort, specifically for mid-to-senior Product Management leaders, is in full swing. Interested in joining the next cohort which will be for product, program/project management, sales or marketing leaders? We'll have further details in our next newsletter in two weeks. In the meantime, drop us a line with any questions or to find out if this might be right for you!

Ask an AI Insider

Q: What's all the hype about ChatGPT? And why is it so controversial among experts in the field?

You're probably already familiar with the media storm and public attention around ChatGPT, the generative text AI tool from OpenAI. It's been so exciting to see a LOT more people (100 million users in fact!) excited about the potential of AI and investigating how it might be used. If you're looking for ways people are using the new tool  - from acting as an interview coach to a writing editor to a nutrition advisor - you can check out some of the great 'prompt directories' like 'Awesome ChatGPT Prompts' or this guide from AI Exchange.

However - there's a lot to be skeptical about, and reasons to use caution if you're looking to use chatGPT beyond playing around to create amusing (of not very good) poetry. Reaction from AI Industry leaders (Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun) and academics (Noam Chomsky, Gary Marcus) has been less enthusiastic that the public reception.

This isn't just sour grapes over OpenAI's success. Along with concerns about plagerism and copyright infringement, large language models are known to 'hallucinate' facts, sometimes when you least expect it. They aren't just 'confidently wrong' - they're deceptively convincing, missing nuances that are difficult to fact-check. Even experts at Google, knowing this weakness, accidentally botched the launch of their ChatGPT competitor Bard by promoting a conversation with factual errors. If Google can miss such a high-profile mistake - are you still confident you'll be able to check your own work?

With this in mind, a few guidelines for using ChatGPT are helpful:

1. Leverage your own creativity before potentially watering it down by succumbing to confirmation bias. While using ChatGPT for brainstorming writing prompts, gift ideas or essay outlines can save time, it can ultimately stifle your own creativity by returning unoriginal ideas. Consider the dangers of using generative art in forensic sketching tools - are you wiping out your own most original ideas before they are fully formed?
2. Consider the potential SEO impacts before copying and pasting any output for public consumption. Ross Dunn, SEO of Stepforth Marketingand host of the SEO 101 podcast, pointed out the issue in his latest episode: " From the school of hard knocks [...], it's very clear whenever something gets easy to do in SEO, it gets hammered down fast because there's going to be people who overuse it." Detecting AI-authored content is possible. Are you willing to do the editing necessary to 'trick' the currently-available detection technology? Or re-write once this technology improves?
3. Stay paranoid about factuality. Many 'prompt engineers' and guides will warn you to check your work, but dismiss the difficulty of catching these errors. Consider the time it takes to meticulously fact-check all your work. And if someone tells you they have found the secret to get 100% correct answers and that you can automate content creation without a human review - they are trying to sell you something.
4. Do explore these tools to learn their uses and limits. But don't get lost in rabbit-holes. Far too many people are investing hundreds of hours trying to design the right questions to get reliable answers - when this has been proven to not be possible. ChatGPT will just be the first of many tools that will help you automate mundane and mechanical tasks. There will be more, and it will become clearer how they really deliver value. It's worth learning the basics to get familiar, but this is NOT your last chance to leverage AI in your life or in your business. The AI race is on - but with each new innovation comes a chance to catch up.

What questions do you have about ChatGPT, generative AI, or leveraging these tools in your work and career? Email us and we'll be answering your most burning questions in future newsletters.