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Amol Kapoor

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Nostradamus

Written February, 2023.

I don't get asked to give talks that frequently, but when I do people generally want to hear my thoughts on ML/AI. I've come to expect questions like 'what is the state of the industry?', 'what should I be paying attention to for {hiring, planning, investment}?', and, my personal favorite, 'can you predict the future?'.

(No one ever actually asks me to predict the future, but there are a bunch of questions of this sort that essentially require me to know what's going to happen, so I categorize these in the same bucket)

I love when people ask me to predict the future, because I feel like I have license to just speculate wildly. The funny thing is, I'm not half bad at it, at least in the ML/AI space. About two years ago, at a talk I gave for Ubiquity, I made the following predictions:

Man! Not to toot my own horn or anything but looking back from 2023 I was pretty on point! I'm personally especially proud of the prompt engineering prediction. Apparently companies are paying a ton of money now for prompt engineers:

Though being actually good at prompt engineering seems about as easy as consistently predicting lottery numbers from tea leaves. Which, given that I have some expertise in doing something vaguely equivalent (as documented here), maybe they should send some of that cash my way 👀

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