Preview: Putting together an AI-101

Recently, I met a founder/CEO of a services business that helps clients with strategy development, implementation planning, more. We got talking about (of course) the AI hype and what it meant for his business. Halfway into brainstorming ideas, he said

“I’d love to understand more of the technical details behind all this LLM stuff. I think that would help me evaluate ideas more realistically, and also have smarter conversations with my tech teams”

It sounded like a fun thing to put together. So, I spent some time creating an outline of what to cover, calling it “AI-101 for the technically curious business leader”. Then I spent many hours converting that into slides. Including some help from a couple of friends, I think I might have put 25-30 hours of total time into it. But I’m only kinda satisfied with the outcome. Here’s why.

There’s a tradeoff between depth, simplicity and attention span. You can’t have all three.

• If I aim for a short, simple presentation it’s hard to not be pithy. There’s no shortage of those online, from consulting firms, VC firms, content farms and more. There’s even some good videos on YouTube (I made a list) but it doesn’t actually tell you much, and IMO doesn’t pass the bar of enabling you to have smart conversations with your tech teams.
• If we add depth, we have to start basic and build up. That takes length. And length requires attention span, precious time which many don’t have or don’t want to put in. My target audience is a business leader, with technical curiosity and possibly an eng/math background, or at least strong logical thinking skills. Even the best ones have long forgotten their undergrad course material. I quickly found out that anything more than an hour (1.5 hrs max) was undesirable for the majority of these folks.
• And lastly, for completeness, if it’s deep and short it can’t be simple. My audience isn’t able to reach technical papers, simply put.

Along the way, I collected a LOT of good, online (freely available) content....

Read the rest of this post on substack, here: https://ashwinlimaye.substack.com/p/putting-together-an-ai-101