Kevin Kelly believes it’s a good time to enter the field of artificial intelligence—but not because of the hype over ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that gained more than 100 million monthly active users just over 60 days after its launch in November.
However, Kelly – futurist, author, and founding executive editor of Cable magazine—think that from the perspective of a few decades, then there are no AI experts today. That means those entering the field now, or in the future, will have plenty of time to make their mark.
“What we tend to call AI, won’t be considered AI years from now,” Kelly said in an interview shared this week on Noahpinion, the Substack blog of economic commentator Noah Smith. “One of the beneficial consequences is that from the perspective of 30 years ago, there are no AI experts today. This is good news for anyone starting now, because you have more opportunities than anyone else to make a breakthrough and become the reigning expert.
Today, millions of people are starting to use “generative AI” tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E 2, which can produce amazing results from simple text prompts. The latter can produce sophisticated images, while the former can answer brief questions, pen essays in a certain writing style, or generate computer code in various programming languages, among other tasks.
The first round of these “primitive AI agents” are “best thought of as universal interns,” Kelly said. People use it to write rough drafts, give code suggestions, summarize research, brainstorm, and more.
The AI whispered
However, achieving high-quality results is not always easy.
“It takes a lot of intimacy to get an AI intern to help you produce great work,” Kelly said. “Some people are 10x and 100x better than others with these tools. They have become the whispers of AI.
Indeed, one way to get started in AI is as a “fast engineer.” (At Washington Post recently profiled one.) These people create directions—or chains of directions—to get AI systems to produce desired results for various purposes and industries.
It is hardly an established field. One of the startups advertising for fast engineers, Anthropic, noted in a job listing: “Since the field of fast engineering may be less than 2 years, this position is a bit difficult to recruit.” The salary range is $175,000 to $335,000.
The company, which created rival ChatGPT Claude and last month attracted a $300 million investment from Google, asked applicants to demonstrate their skills by “spending some time experimenting with Claude … the signs they created.”
The company describes the big language model—which is based on AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude—as a “new type of intelligence” and says “the art of giving instructions in a way that gives the best results is still in its infancy.”
Artificial intelligence as a whole is still in its infancy – very much so, Kelly believes.
“The long-term effects of AI will affect our society more than electricity and fire,” he said, “but the full effect will take centuries to play out.”
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