Funny, but about 35 years ago I blocked my boss’s boss from buying a company that wrote an “AI coding tool”. I change my mind about things and what I found ridiculously simple and un-useful 35 years ago, is very different than Copilot.

I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to fully conceptualize how much AI tools will change knowledge work.

I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982 and I find it exciting how fast the field is now progressing. I worked as a consultant at Google in 2013 with their Knowledge Graph and that opened my eyes to the possibilities of so much structured and organized (they had a very good Ontology team) knowledge. Six years ago I managed a deep learning team at Capital One and mostly because of the strong team, I was surprised how effective deep learning is for practical problems.

One last example: in the 1980s I spent a fair amount of time trying to write code manually for anaphora resolution - a problem that BERT models now solve “simply.”