The 'Am I Getting Steamrolled by AI?' Framework

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🚜 The ‘Am I Getting Steamrolled?’ Framework 🚜

Probably the most common question I get about AI is whether and how much someone should be afraid. As an engineer by study and advisor by craft, my answer is that… it depends.

However, that’s a shit answer to a very important question. So I asked myself, how does someone actually address the elephant in the room?

For those reasons, today, I am providing you with the ‘Am I getting steamrolled by AI?’ framework, a no-hype, easy-to-understand mental model so that you can rest easy from now on if you happen to be safe… or start finding solutions to the problem before it’s too late.

As always, I will examine this question from three perspectives: as an employee, an entrepreneur, and an investor, to ensure that everyone benefits from it.

Let’s do this!

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Setting the Stage

Clarifying several premises beforehand is fundamental, no matter how tempting it is to go straight to the point.

These premises are based on my understanding after years of working in this industry and the intuitions I’ve developed over time based on my experiences and the opinions of some of the most respected actors on the main stage.

Simply put, understanding where AI comes from (its current strengths and, more importantly, its main limitations) will make the framework more realistic and interpretable while avoiding falling into pointless overhype or wishful thinking.

And that starts with the compression principle, the true answer to what AI is.

The Compression Principle

Although it may initially seem counterintuitive, AI is synonymous with data compression. Without a doubt, those two words are by far the best summary of the current state of AI today (and may I insist on the word ‘current’ for now).

In simple terms, today’s AI takes a huge amount of data and compresses the knowledge derived from it into a digital file named ‘model’ by extracting the underlying patterns of the data.

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