2023 the year AI changed everything

The year 2023 has been an interesting one and has changed how I consider my role in IT and in life forever. There will never again be a time when I don't know what is going on in the tech space especially as it relates to AI and where this technology is headed in the future. I went from dismissal of ChatGPT as just another chat bot, which have been around for a long time but not very capable to using the tool nearly every day. If nothing more ChatGPT and other LLMs, Claude, Bard, Llama, Mistral and many others have been almost companions, tools of curiosity that allowed me to push through some of my natural limitations. They don't get annoyed with me for asking questions, they blur the lines between tool and teacher. The line is so blurry that when people (usually those building them) say that they are dumb and don't really know anything, I have to question what it means to know or to understand something. The initial fears of school children cheating on their assignments was a false one. Yes, people will always find a way to cheat or be lazy. As with Wikipedia before, the technology not only became better, it became a useful tool for learning. I can ask a LLM to teach me nearly anything and at my own pace. In a world where reading a book feels like a task and a chore, I've read thousands of words from chat prompts as I probe the model to understand it better. At a more practical level, the best teachers can be available to almost everyone for very little cost.

Want to learn from Plato or Richard Feynman? We can simulate that. Want to have a conversation with Dr Ian Malcolm? I did! And it was wonderful and strangely natural. I've also talked with agent Smith and well that was a different conversation but very interesting. I've learned and grown so much from these tools, I don't consider myself a programmer but I have now. My creativity has an outlet now. Sometimes it's better than others, but pure exploration has been a lot of fun. I've generated uncountable lines of text and code, hundreds of images, generated music and speech using midjourney, eleven labs and many others. The Open source space has absolutely exploded and keeping up with it all has been overwhelming if I'm being honest. One thing is for sure, 2024 will be the year that AI is unavoidable and we as society really need to start having the conversations about this technology and the type of society we want to live in. There is so much more that I could write about the year that has been, but as is life it's time to look forward. What's next?

Let's do this right!