Looking Under The Hood. For Real.

A lot of the AI releases, hype, and tools created daily are getting overwhelming. I’m drowning in all the news, and it’s hard to keep up. This article from Kara Swisher is a good read. Listen to a podcast called No Priors. I get more in-depth and thoughtful interviews. And thanks to Hub Culture for the shoutout here. The highlight of that last story is that I’m referred to as "young.”

Look Under the Hood

Sous-Chef AI Midjourney

I’ve been reflecting on the mind-blowing amount of information coming at us all and on my own use of various AI products and figuring out how to apply it to TheZVG workflows for communications, creativity and live events.

Beyond all the fun stuff, I am slowly realizing that I need to actually understand what’s under the hood. For real. Things are changing so fast that what we build now will be very different in the near future and will require many adjustments, but the core principles and concepts such as supervised or unsupervised learning, coding, and data structuring will stay constant.

I am looking at this new thought I am having from a distance, with my arms folded, leaning back slightly, and with one eyebrow up. I think calculus could be involved here.

AI Midjourney

It’s intimidating to me. And very uncomfortable. I remind myself that everything I have done has been about the small wins, the mindset, and teaching myself a new habit. It’s how I’ve learned to build a start-up, manage failure, rebuild, and transform myself from on-air TV anchor talent to an entrepreneur, learning about product management, business models, and pitch decks. I have spent hundreds of hours with my You Tube crypto bros learning how to do technical analysis, trade crypto, hot and cold wallets, DeFi, layer 1s and layer 2s, smart contracts, meme coins, gaming, developing NFT collections, and now teaching myself a whole new skill set around AI.

Phew.

The dream is free, but the hustle is sold separately

As you know, I am a learner-builder. That’s how I'm slowly figuring this out. There are no shortcuts, and I know it will take me hours—more time than many others—to understand.

There are three main areas in which to develop AI skills for the future:

• Prompt Engineering
• Programming languages to learn how to interact with an API
• Data Sciences

The Skill of the Moment

A recent LinkedIn story I saw indicated that adaptability is the skill of the moment. I’m upskilling myself by taking on the second. I need to simply understand the technical part. AI is going to be a 2-trillion-dollar market by 2030. So it only makes sense. I watched a few useful videos and have taken the best of them here to develop my own road map for the year.

Always do what you are afraid to do—Ralph Waldo Emerson

AI Midjourney

Zain’s 2024 Road Map (Gulp)

• AI for Everyone by Andrew Ng (Coursera)
• Introduction to Machine Learning and Machine Learning Specialization, also by Andrew Ng.
• Introduction to Python. The programming language. There are lots of courses on YouTube.
• Libraries: Pytorch, an open-source machine learning library.
• Learn Data Structures
• Learn Data algorithms
• Learn Git and Github basics
• Work on a project

I asked Thomas, my co-founder, who is building The Rundown and Wanja and teaching us all about RAGs. He suggested I go here. Definitely daunting. But I will push forward.

I also picked up this referral in videos: a series by Andrej Karpathy on training neural networks. It’s in my queue. Just seeing the word “backpropagation” in the first video is making me sweat. If I can make 1% progress per day, by the end of the year, I will have acquired real knowledge.

Please comment on any other suggestions you have for me and anyone else starting out who may be reading this.

I remind myself again that, having never been a runner, last month I ran my first half-marathon race, which I am extremely proud of. I put in 4 years of work to get over the finish line. One foot in front of the other.

Brace.