Many self-professed 'experts' are charging people to 'teach' AI courses, but with such a new technology that is changing practically every day, taking classes in it is not practical, says the columnist. — Tribune News Service
IT’S no secret that I’m neck deep in using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate content. I find the technology fascinating and can see no future where all industries are not heavily influenced by AI.
That said, I see a lot of folks offering AI courses, and people not wanting to be left behind are considering taking them. To which I say, no! Absolutely do not take classes in AI right now.
Why?
The first reason is that AI is still developing. Fast. Nothing in human history has scaled as fast as AI. Not electricity, not the Internet, not smartphones. The adoption speed of AI is insane. The telephone took 75 years to get to 50 million users. TV took 22 years. Facebook, three years. And ChatGPT got there in two months.
Part of this is because for those other technologies we had to build the foundation first. AI already has it’s foundation laid, the Internet. Now all it needs to be is useful. Which it is.
But the most important part of AI development isn’t just its adoption – that speaks to its utility – but the fact that AI as a tool is changing fast. Improving faster than any tech before it.
Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, famously said way back in the 1960s that computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months – it’s not exact but, basically, it means an exponential growth of power.
AI is increasing in orders of magnitude greater than that. AI is in a six- to 12-month doubling cycle. And that leads to jumps in capabilities that are massive: ChatGPT2 to ChatGPT3 was a 100x jump. And money keeps pouring into companies on the Ai frontier, like DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic.
What does this mean for taking lessons in AI? It means you’re taking lessons in something that isn’t finished. Which functionally means workflow is not set in stone. The processes you use for AI are not written.
Take for example the limitations in AI video generation. On a current project, I wanted to use AI to generate younger versions of characters to use in flashback scenes that would otherwise be very expensive to shoot. Three months ago, I could do it, sort of, but it was messy and didn’t look very good. Now not only is it completely doable, it looks great.
And this isn’t the only change. Veo3, Google’s video generation AI, has a new update every few days it seems. The model is getting better and better – and because of that workflows keep changing.
There is no course you can take that can teach you proper AI workflows because they do not exist at this moment.
The second reason not to sign up for courses in AI is we’re not at that stage of development. I’ve said before, we’re in the Napster phase of AI.
For those of you who don’t remember Napster, it was the first app that allowed users to share files online. It was largely used to share digital music, and it was clunky and hard to use, but it was the forebear of digital music streaming. This is the phase of AI we are in.
If you have specific cases you want to use AI in, you’re better off getting onto some of the tools and experimenting with them. This is the phase where if you like getting stuck in, getting your hands dirty, and trial and error-ing solutions, you will be rewarded. But even when I figure out a workaround to create younger versions of the actors in the projects I work on, I know that in a year or two, that workflow will be useless because there will be some way to do it easier.
Until AI enters the Spotify phase, where there are specific apps tailored for consumers to use every day, there is no real point in learning this nitty-gritty part of AI.
The other part of the reason to not pay anyone to teach you how to use AI is that AI is perhaps the most user-friendly tool ever created.
Just log in to any AI large language model and treat it like an assistant. Ask it questions. Ask it to complete tasks, ask it to do whatever you want, and it will do it. Want to learn how to use Veo3? As ChatGPT or something like it to teach you. And just keep asking it questions.
If you’re hesitating because you think you need lessons, odds are you’re not going to be the kind of person who really gets into AI anyway. Just wait until AI is packaged nicely and integrated into your life, and you’ll end up using it without even knowing it.
