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

Saturday, January 18, 2025

The Hidden Value of AI

Most talk about the value of AI is in the realm of answering questions or creation: code, essays, pictures, movies, etc.

But I think an underestimated feature of AI is its ability to understand what you want.  In other words, combine the communications ability of Chat GPT , Grok, etc with non-AI tasks, such as making changes to a spreadsheet, filling in a form, etc.

Think of being able to execute a complex formula, or extensively reformat your document without having to look up extensive menu picks and command key sequences.

The advantage with this way of using AI is that hallucinations, if they occur, are trivial since you know what you want.  For example, if you tell an AI to change the quote in the third paragraph to italics, and it changes it to bold, you can see that, and simply re-tell it to change it to italics.

How much easier would a doctor's day be if he could tell AI:  "Create a pre-authorization for Insurance company ACME, for Mrs. Smith, for an MRI."

(Yes, after all of Wile E. Coyote's injuries, ACME branched out into health insurance :-) )
© 2025 Praveen Puri

Learning and Doing

After you attend a seminar or read a book just pick one or two improvements, ignore the rest, and work on implementing them successfully. You return on investment on the book or seminar will be much higher than if you greedily try to process everything to "get your money's worth".


© 2025 Praveen Puri