Q1 Review for 2023

It might be a bit late to do a review of the first quarter of 2023 at the end of April, but I think it is still worth doing. This is my first time to write a quarterly review, so I am not sure how it will go. I thought I will just write down my thoughts and see how it goes.

• ChatGPT in 2023
• The importance of AI in 21st century
• Leadership, china factor and the economy
• Geoffrey Hinton’s talk about future of AI

ChatGPT in 2023

Figure 1. My Github commit history for Q1 2023.

Checking my Github commit history shows that I have been working on my goals consistently throughout the quarter. Indeed, I am quite happy with my progress on getting deep into machine learning and deep learning.

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has stirred up a lot of interest in AI and deep learning. In one of my previous posts, I have mentioned that I did not expect the advancement of AI to be so fast back in 2019. I took my first machine learning course in 2019 and soon I realized the potential of AI. That’s why I decided to take a math degree in University College Dublin from 2019 to 2020. After working in a computer vision startup for a year, I switched to natural language processing (NLP) in 2021.

In terms of NPL’s development, two papers mark the history of AI:

• In 2013, a paper called Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality was published by Tomas Mikolov et al (Mikolov et al., 2013)
• In 2017, another paper called Attention is all you need was published by Ashish Vaswani et al (Vaswani et al., 2017)
• In 2023, literally, everyone is talking about ChatGPT.

Figure 2. The evolutional tree of Language Models (from [Github: Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide])

The importance of AI in 21st century

There are many books and articles that talk about the importance of AI in the 21st century. I found the the speech by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, to be very insightful when he gave a speech at Naval War College Foundation in May 2022.

In the above video, Eric outlined a vision in 5 to 10 years time where AI will be used in every aspect of our lives and its potential with synthetic biology. I don’t know too much about synthetic biology, but I do agree with Eric that AI will be used in every aspect of our lives.

In my mind, I image my children will have a personal AI assistant that will help them with their homework and learning. This AI assistant could be in the form of a robot or a hologram, like R2 in Star Wars. I thought it could be my life goal to build such an AI assistant for my children.

The speech given by Eric is on strategy level. The following video by Christopher Bishop, the former director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, is more technical. In the video, Christopher talked about the history of AI, and how the recent advancement in deep learning has changed the landscape of AI and changed people’s way of thinking and working with computers.

Leadership, china factor and the economy

The future of AI is not only about technology, but also about leadership. We are facing a new world that many things will be disrupted by AI, also by the rise of China. To cope with all these changes and uncertainties ahead, we need strong leadership.

But, what is leadership? And, what kind of leadership do we need in the 21st century? I found the following speech by Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, to be very insightful.

The take away message from the above video is that we need leaders who have a strong capability to communicate with people and to understand the world. But, the one thing that got my attention is that Lee Kuan Yew said that the 21st century requires a different kind of leadership. Let me quote what he said:

The issue now is that ‘can Singapore continue to upgrade its people, educate, train and innovate our greatest economy’, revamp itself and have a leadership that inspires a younger generation no longer deprived, widely travelled, comfortable at home, knowledgeable of the outside world, but still fire in their bellies to achieve. That requires a different kind of leadership, which is a challenge for us. So, leadership depends on time, place and circumstance, the needs of the people and a group of leaders or A leader who is able to articulate what they want and what she/he thinks will be good for them and to persuade them to follow and bring them forward.

I found the above quote to be very insightful. When I talk to people around me, I found that people’s needs and wants are very different, diverse and complex. With everybody becoming a comfortable unit with her/his own comfortable world and life, it is very difficult to find a common ground to unite people.

Telling people that the world is changing and the future is full of uncertainties is not longer inspiring. Meanwhile, a strong sense of self-identity and self-esteem is rooted in people’s mind, which makes it even more difficult to unite people because common values are no longer common and compromise is no longer an option when you are the center of the universe.

Therefore, the role of money and the economy is becoming more and more important. Money is the only thing that can unite people not in a spiritual way, but in a material way. Although company culture and values are important, a large part of the reason why people work for a company is because of money. You can still have a dynamic team impelled by a common goal, but the overall organization will properly work and function only around profit and money.

Therefore, for a company to be successful, the leadership has to be able to run profitably. For a country to be successful, the leadership has to be able to run the economy well. This explains why having a strong leadership in the developed economies is hard, whereas having a strong leadership in the developing economies is easy because the starting point is low and the common goal is clear.

I think whatever I do in the future, I have to keep thinking about how to have a strong leadership in the 21st century around people who are comfortable with their own world and life. I think this is the biggest challenge for the 21st century.

In general, we can have some rules to follow when we think about leadership in the 21st century:

• for ambitious people, they tend to have a strong sense of self-identity and self-esteem, therefore, one should not try to change their mind, but to inspire them to follow you
• for people who are not very ambitious, they need to have a strong sense of belonging, therefore, one should not try to inspire them, but to make them feel that they belong to the group with money and profit
• for people who are below average, they need to have a strong sense of security and stability, so, feed them with that.

But, to work with all kinds of people, we need a group of leaders who can communicate with different communities and understand the world. This is the kind of leadership that we need in the 21st century.

Now, let’s talk about our economy. I think the economy is the most important thing in the 21st century. The economy is the foundation of everything. Without a strong economy, we cannot have a strong leadership. Although I spent 3 years studying economics, I still found it difficult to understand our economy fully. Market is probably by far the most complex system that human beings have ever created.

Because of the complexity of the market, I think it is very difficult to have some principles to guide us when we think about the economy. I found Ray Dalio’s thinking on the economy to be very insightful.

There are two dimensions or influences that affect the economy: productivity and inflation. Productivity is the ability to produce more with less. Inflation is the increase in the price of goods and services.

Productivity is all about endogenous factors, such as technology, education, and innovation, which are the things happening in the real economy. Inflation is all about exogenous factors, such as monetary policy, fiscal policy, and politics, which are the things happening in the financial economy. How those two dimensions interact with each other determines the state of the economy.

The following table summarizes the four states of the economy and the corresponding investment strategies:

For more discussion on this topic, please refer to the following video:

At the end of this post, let’s talk about China. I found the following video to be very insightful. It is a speech by Yukon Huang, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the topic of China’s economic in the 21st century.

Geoffrey Hinton’s talk about future of AI

The Current State of Artificial Intelligence with James Wang