January, 2025
A few months ago I was part of a local charity auction. I donated three things: two pies (one blackberry-raspberry and one chocolate pecan), and an Intro to AI Workshop.
The pies were an easy sell. The Christmas after the movie Waitress came out in 2007, my Mom got me a pie pan and recipe book, and we’ve been making pies together ever since (including when I temporarily lost my mind in the middle of COVID and thought a Cheez-It pie would be funny. It was not.).
The AI Workshop was a request from a friend that helps organize the auction. She shared that each year, some of the most popular smaller auction items were tech support for seniors. I told her a bit about more about my work, and she convinced me that there would be appetite for an AI course amongst seniors.
This past weekend, around a set of couches and laptops, we chatted through what we’re hearing in the news, the importance on AI literacy, how to use ChatGPT, Claude, and other GenAI tools, and what to keep an eye out for. We talked through more than what I covered in the initial deck, including how to look out for hallucinations, and increase in scams their community is facing. We talked about the rise of AI voice scams and the need for creating a family “safe world” to verify someone’s identify, and left the workshop having planned someone’s trip to Ireland in the spring, and using Sora to create clips of 80s dance moves. We addressed very reasonable fears of misaligned AI, but left with a feeling of excitement in the air.
While I don’t claim to be an engineer or AI researcher, I do have some things to share from my last ~2 years working in AI. This is a bit of an accidental update to my post from last year, Lessons from 2 Months in AI, but now we’re 20 months in.
Without further ado: