**_Every PathShiftPeople founder gets to post a "Hello world" here. This one's Mathew's, from mid-2023.
The recent arrival of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models is not the first time society has been challenged by a new technology tearing into everyone's consciousness, moving fast and threatening to break everything. It's certainly not mine.
But I have a confession to make.
Although I've been playing with ChatGPT since late 2022, I still feel I have a tenuous "hold" on this technology: what it is, how it works, and what it means.
That's a little ironic, because I have a pretty good track record of adapting new technologies to my clients' needs. But despite the fact that I don't write code (I hate, I mean really hate, debugging), I was always able to see how an emerging technology could be used, what it's potential was... and what problems it wouldn't solve (hint: look under "organisational" or "cultural").
Not so ChatGPT. Which sounds like a problem, given that I'm giving courses on it. But as Tom Peters would put it: "if you're not confused, you're not paying attention".
At one level, LLMs are enigmas. You type your request into the online equivalent of the Delphic oracle, and back comes words. You don't see where they came from. You don't understand "who" uttered them. But they seem more human than any mere software output, right down to their unpredictability ("Ask the same question twice, get two different answers!") and might-be-wrongness ("Best check that one on Google!").
Worse than that, however, is that as soon as you think you do have a handle on it, it changes.
Did you first think it was a new-look search engine? It isn't, it hallucinates, and can even be abusive. OK, so it's just a stochastic parrot, or a blurry jpeg of the web? Well, no, it's probably just a matter of time before LLMs earn a better reputation for accuracy; in any case, you're best off thinking of it as a creative tool. But I saw someone build an entire production team out of it? That's right, and by the way some people prefer to think of AI as people, or even another form of life.
Every time you absorb a new lesson, incorporate it into your worldview and start thinking through a strategy on your whiteboard, you turn back to your phone to find some new development, some hidden feature brought to light, a frontier newly discovered or demolished, a new paradigm every week that completely wipes out not only your nascent strategy, but your entire understanding. It's exhausting.
And it's only been a few months.
Despite the impression given by the neverending glut of blog posts from self-anointed experts claiming to have "cracked it", we're all in this boat together, trying to figure out how and where to steer while staying afloat. Even the engineers who build these things are constantly wrongfooted by what they can do.
So here's the thing to remember: This journey will take the rest of your life. AI's not going to slow down - quite the opposite! - so trying to keep up like you used to just won't work.
"This journey will take the rest of your life... trying to keep up like you used to just won't work. We need to change the way we view change"
In previous decades, I responded to accelerating change by upping my game: productivity routines, knowledge management systems and personal content strategies became daily tools, refined constantly.
Today, I suspect, that can never be enough. In the face of such unrelenting, furiously fast change, we'll need to change the way we view change. AI is changing the paradigm. Time to change your paradigm.
But that is a longterm transformation. What to do _right now?
One key to our approach at PathShiftPeople is to use AI to keep up with AI: this is the only way we could get our understanding to a point we felt confident sharing it. Fortunately we had a bit of a head start: it took around a day's programming to integrate ChatGPT into MyHub.ai, for example, so it was pretty easy to integrate it into our daily desk research processes.
Another key, of course, was to create PathShiftPeople. For me, it's more than a business opportunity, it's a way of teaming up with a pair of complementary minds at opposing edges of the world's two largest oceans to tackle this journey together.
There's plenty of room, so join us.