The next phase of Artificial Intelligence: Are you ready?

By now you’ve all heard about Chat GPT, the generative AI platform that’s taking the world by storm. I first heard about it last year and I had two initial feelings…

The first was fear- I wondered what the implications were for the thousands of Software Engineers we were training (especially after we had just acquired Holberton, the highly-rated Silicon Valley school of software engineering.) Would it affect the job market for our newly minted engineers positively or negatively? What would it mean for the sectors that have historically relied on human beings to think- like education, healthcare, etc.-as we move closer towards so-called “general artificial intelligence” (where a computer is basically as intelligent as a human being).

The second feeling was excitement. I am particularly interested in exploring how we can use AI to radically reduce the costs of delivering world-class healthcare, education, energy, nutrition, housing , entertainment, mobility and so many other services and products to billions of people who live in less developed parts of the world like Africa, Asia, and Latin America. AI can help such regions weather the effects of climate change, manufacture more of what they need, and drive rapid economic growth and poverty reduction. In this version of the world, the army of software engineers and data scientists we’re developing will have plenty of work to do and will unleash progress for humanity at a scale and speed never before seen.

I will write more about these possibilities in a later article, but one of the things that really blew me away about the recent advancements in generative AI are the ‘sisters’ of Chat GPT like ‘Dall-E’ and ‘Midjourney’ which enable machines to create original images and visuals that have never been seen before (#AI Art).

In December last year, we coached thousands of our software engineers in a short 2 hour seminar on how to use these generative AI tools, and then challenged them to create visual images of their experience in our software engineering training programs. Below is a collage of the exceptional art that they came up with (or that computers came up with based on their prompts).

This next image was one of my favorites. It was designed by Mayen from Nigeria. She already has a Master’s degree in biochemistry and is in the middle of a PhD. She is also a part time university lecturer and a wife and mother. She somehow still finds the time to devote the 70-100 hours per week for 12 months that it takes to go through our rigorous software engineering training program. The powerful image below is entitled “Mom who codes: the untold story”. I had the chance to meet Mayen and several other students that we flew to join our recent all staff retreat in Rwanda. She is every bit as impressive as this image shows.?

Finally, the image below was the one I couldn’t stop laughing about. One of the learners combined a picture of myself and Julien Barbier- who is the co-founder of Holberton (the Silicon Valley tech training company we acquired). This is what the computer thinks a “mixture” of Julien and I would look like. How crazy is that?)

“Hey AI, create a?Julien and Fred Merger”

This picture is clear proof that we are living in the most disruptive times the world has ever seen, and things are going to move very quickly with these new developments. Are you ready?