Sunday, February 16, 2025

The Stick






© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Value of A Second Language


A hen was taking a stroll with her baby chicks.  Suddenly, a hungry cat jumped out in front of them.  


The hen said “bow-wow-wow!” And the cat scampered off.  The hen told her chicks, “see children, it pays to learn a second language.”



© 2025 Praveen Puri

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

The Secret for Thriving in A World of AI and Rapid Change


In school (and programming classes) you learn to solve well-defined problems. The real value is being able to analyze the real world and write the well-defined problem.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Get Your Teams to Innovate and Take Risks


Do you want to your team to innovate and take risks?  

You need to not only encourage it, but incentivize for it. Give away two awards (and bonuses): one to the best innovation that succeeds, but also to the best one (in terms of creativity and risk/reward ratio) that failed.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Monday, February 10, 2025

Chat GPT Answered a Meta-question I asked It!

I was taking with Chat GPT about AI and machine language, and I asked it this meta question. I'm impressed that it understood:

but do you need to have seen an exact version of what I ask, or can you interpret it. For example, if I ask you to write a ruby function that takes a number, and adds 5 to it, and you do it, does that mean that in your training you saw a ruby function that added 5 to a number, or is it possible that you saw an example where you added 2?
ChatGPT said:

Great question! I do not need to have seen an exact version of what you ask—I can interpret your request and generate a response based on my understanding of patterns.


How I Handle This:

  1. I break down your request into concepts

    • "Write a Ruby function" → I know the syntax for Ruby functions.
    • "Takes a number" → I recognize how functions accept parameters in Ruby.
    • "Adds 5 to it" → I understand basic arithmetic operations in Ruby.
  2. I generalize from related examples

    • Even if I’ve never seen a function that adds exactly 5 before, I’ve seen many functions that add numbers in general.
    • If I saw an example where a function added 2, I can generalize that concept and modify it to add 5 instead.
  3. I generate the most likely correct answer

    • Based on my knowledge of Ruby syntax and arithmetic, I can predict the following:
      ruby
      def add_five(n) n + 5 end
    • Even if I had never seen an exact version of this before, I can construct it using patterns and logical reasoning.

Key Takeaways

✅ I don’t need to have seen the exact function before.
✅ I recognize the underlying programming pattern.
✅ I generalize from similar examples and adjust accordingly.
✅ My response is based on probabilities, syntax rules, and logic rather than memorization.

Would you like to test this by asking me for something slightly more complex? 😃


© 2025 Praveen Puri

Monday, January 27, 2025

New Chinese AI DeepSeek

The tech markets sold off today because Chinese AI company DeepSeek just released an AI model that is as good as Western models, but without the latest chips, and at 1% of the cost.


It shows that the government ban on high-end chips to China forced them to get innovative, and they caught up.


It's possible that the U.S. bans DeepSeek, but that might not matter.This might be like running the 5 minute mile. Once Roger Bannister did "the impossible", several other people did it. So now DeepSeek has shown that it's possible to build a good model with less.


In the long run, this will help the tech markets. I'm sure Nvidia will still have to sell chips for big models.


© 2025 Praveen Puri

Thursday, January 23, 2025

What Children Should Learn in School Today, To Prepare for Tomorrow

Here are the skills that kids today should learn, to have a successful future (Number 0 is the most important):

** 0. In school (and programming classes) you learn to solve well-defined problems. The real value is being able to analyze the real world and write the well-defined problem.

1. Critical thinking.
2. Being able to brainstorm / discuss with an open mind.
3. test and iterate quickly
4. Be able to communicate details and context, to eliminate ambiguity.
5. Be curious and willing to learn new things.
6. Have reading and self-learning skills.

© 2025 Praveen Puri