Leadership and Personal Growth in the Era of *AI*

“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed by who they were last year, probably isn’t learning enough.”
– Alain De Botton

The problem with that statement is the “shame’ implied. I don’t want you to be embarrassed by anything. A better version of this sentiment might be

Anyone who isn’t impressed by all the goals they have accomplished since last year needs to establish a better strategy.

– John McElhenney – iterativ.ai

Let’s talk about *ai* and what it means for your career, your brain power, and your future enthusiasm for learning something new.

A few things we need to start managing.

Input

What are you feeding and training your LLLM on? (Large Living Language Model) Do you have classes in your future? A few good news feeds? Sites and leaders in the *ai* industry that you follow and read? Here’s the thing. My *ai* plans change daily. Understanding the new technologies (arriving about 3 per hour) might be important to your future knowledge and well-being. I say that because I believe you’re going to need all the *ai* data you can find. You need to be training and filling your L3M with more than TikToks and PDF downloads from MIT. Here are a few inputs that might begin to help you architect your next leap.

TLDR – AI – newsletter
AI Professional Services Leadership Group on LinkedIn
Follow me on LinkedIn
Follow John Nosta on LinkedIn (author, philosopher, Psychology Today AI guy)
Follow Jeff Wilson on LinkedIn (AI artist, conversationalist, GPT-ified)

Output

What are you building with *ai* today? Are you having conversations about opportunities and startup ideas around *ai* and new world order? How are you expressing or capturing your Brilliant Human Thoughts about *ai*? Here’s a fact, *ai* is not smart. It does have intelligence but only in the universe of math and letters. *AI* cannot understand the human meaning of a word. Nor can the GPTs do more than mimic human intelligence. There’s no genius/ghost in the machine. LLMs and even the most brilliant transformers are more like Rachel from Blade Runner than you or me.

A word like “Loss” to an LLM/AI tool is a logic equation. To a human, the same word triggers our human emotions. It fires immediate neurochemicals to prompt our mind and brings back images, feelings, context, and stores faster than the speed of light. Much faster than the most powerful array of GPUs. Even the largest dataset in existence, the internet, cannot match the human-nourished and stored data in your mind. You may not be accessing or transforming that data if you’re not paying attention. Let me give you an example of this simple mindfulness step that will help you jack-in to your own mind. Play along with me.

What memories and thoughts come into your immediate consciousness when I use the word LOSS?

(pause with that word and the resulting magic that is happening in your mind, with this simple PROMPT I just issued to you)

Let’s unpack the data a bit, I’ll use my neuro:memory for the example.

RAG – Retrieval Augmented Generation

LOSS

my mom died 4 years ago after covid ran her into an assisted living facility completely isolated and harsh from the shutdown
a year earlier my brother died of cancer (smoking and alcoholism accelerating his demise)
i lost a woman and her son as a future partner
recent poor managers sabotaged my success to protect their fragile egos
the idea of subtraction – no longer available – less than – math

Those are my human-generated language-simulations of the emotional recall that happened in my brain:mind in a split second after prompting myself with the word LOSS. What are your touchpoints? What did you think about? My guess is, unlike an LLM, you did not think about addition vs subtraction. You probably did not go to a catalog of text lightly-tethered to the word “loss.” Your mind begins to build pictures, feelings, words, and maybe even sounds (music or video voice-over). And here’s the pause I want you to consider.

Pause in that moment and examine the generative results of your own memories and feelings. Can you understand that NO LLM or GPT or AI yet created can have that EMOTIONAL or HUMAN response to a simple prompt like: LOSS.

In your own way, begin to pause when your mind brings back curious or interesting results. In my case, for this moment, my mind asks the question, “What would Perplexity.ai, Claude,ai, or ChatGPT give back on the prompt, “loss.” Even Gemini the new BARD will give dramatically different results, due to Google’s access to all the known data on the public internet.

ASIDE: What about the Wayback Machine? Is there an LLM that contains, or is beginning to digest the contents of the Wayback Machine?

The mindful moment I’m trying to give to you as a tool for your own training and enrichment of your mind, is this: pause with your own data, pause and explore/play/describe/revivify your memories. When used opportunistically, you will begin to understand why people like John Nosta are giving a lot of ink to how LLMs and AI are changing the way we think about intelligence. And in this case, how we begin to explore and illuminate our own Large Living Language Model: ourselves and our own brilliant minds.

Here’s an overview from Microsoft: RAG on Azure.

Psychonaut

Let’s define the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonaut

As an explorer of your own mind:brain you have a grand adventure ahead. There are structures and neurochemical flashes of brilliance that can only happen when you are tuned in and prompting your own LLLM rather than the web-version: Google. Here’s an idea, when you have a silly question, like “Who is that actor? I recognize him from something I watched recently.” Rather than doing a web search or an ai-search for the connection, simply give your own mind the task of reexamining your returned results and digging deeper, perhaps into some of the offline (not conscious) memories and data packets.

The closer you pay attention to your experience of the moment, your L3M results, your own interpretation of the world and your place in it, the closer you are to discovering the magic that is YOU. I know that comes across as woo-woo, but I am trying to tease an idea out of you for a better response to this idea. You have more data in your brain than you have conscious access to. That’s why we forget the name of our past coworker from four years ago. The name is still in our brain, but it is in offline storage, the 70%-gray-matter storage area. Dark fiber the data center engineers and technical sales teams call them. The dark fibers of your brain, are merely un-lit, not powered, not currently in use. It is through your own prompts, variations, re-prompts, and then… the… pause… Give your L3M a chance to Augment the original Retrival of Data from within your human experience.

That’s enough for now. Be curious. Keep prompting yourself as much as you’re prompting huggingface models and new releases. Then pause and let the massive intelligence that is you go a little deeper into the meaning, feeling, and experience that is 100% Human, 100% You, and 100% Gold. The real answers to your human questions cannot be answered by accessing literature, physics, and mathematical formulas. You and you alone have the access, the prompts, and the generative ability to open and interpret new threads of inquiry.