Hello, Dear Subscribers! There are more and more of you every day, and I am extremely happy about this! So welcome to the second issue of "So Nerdy Planet #2"!
Today we're gonna speak about the next items:
- AI is the new electricity. Andrew Ng told us this many years ago, but it seems only now that we understand what it means.
- How stock vesting in startups can be risky. Even on the most successful ones (using the example of Windsurf)
- StackOverflow Annual Report, and why it is a great time to be an Engineering Manager!
- And of course, a book recommendation for this week!
1. AI is a new electricity!
You've probably heard this so many times. First time it was mentioned by Andrew Ng in his lecture at Stanford in 2017:
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Andrew focused mostly on how AI is going to change industries and compared it with electricity, which changed the world over 100 years ago. Well, now, after years from this lecture, we can definitely say that Andrew was right - AI definitely changed everything, except hairdressing :)
Of course, AI started changing the industry a long time ago, and mostly it was connected with software and the availability of the hardware that can power that software. Yeah, those good old times when you could launch an ML model for cat picture categorization on your laptop ( I know that you can launch LLMs on your PC, give me some place for the nostalgia, god damn it).
But the real deal started in 2022, when OpenAI released its first public version of ChatGPT. From the day of release, even the industry's most skeptical players felt that a new era was coming.
Yeah, that era, when anyone can use and interact with AI.
Coding? AI!
Cooking? AI!
Hitting the gym? AI!
Need a significant other? AI!
Hundreds of AI startups are created and closed every day.
But let's get back to the concept of electricity. As Andrej Karpathy mentioned on his YC Combinator lecture, LLMs have all the properties of utilities:
And it is hard to fight this. Companies are building a grid and selling tokens.
Now, it would be hard to find a person who would like to live in places without utilities ( e.g., no water, electricity, or internet ). Businesses cannot even exist without them. Same now we can observe about AI. And I am not even talking about startups which are "just ChatGPT wrappers". They eventually will be killed by the new OpenAI dev days release. The question is more fundamental: if the new generation of tech-bros is able to even code without AI?
