After the Party Tricks

After the Party Tricks - Using AI for Real Work

How do you go beyond the fun of re-writing a report in the voice of a pirate to actually performing real work? In this presentation I look at the three biggest problems you will meet when trying to use current AI models for work, and show how we can solve them.

After the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 many people got very excited, and started to make claims about things that they were going to use if for. On the one hand it was great to see people finally become aware of the power of these technologies, but on the other it was a liitle strange how naive people were in their understanding of how the technology actually worked.

It was amusing to see how many people suddenly declared themselves as ‘AI experts’ having only spent a few hours playing with ChatGPT!

In many ways the public ChatGPT interface can be thought of as the ‘demo version’ - it showed what the underlying models could do, but not the steps needed to use the models for ‘real work.’

This talk was intended to open people’s eyes to the realities of building AI-powered systems. I originally presented it at the West Chapter of the Insights Association, and then again in an expanded version as a webinar. You can watch the full webinar below: