The only way out of my grief was by learning. What grief you ask?
January 16, 2023, I tried ChatGPT. I was astonished to find a tool so powerful that I thought to use it before even doing a Google search. As a Google employee for over two decades, that made my heart stop. I pinged Maya. I showed her ChatGPT. I pinged Des. I showed her ChatGPT. Every demo I gave, jaws dropped.
Google announced layoffs just 4 days later on January 20. Between the lines were whispers about "generative AI". The grief became personal as treasured colleagues were cut.
Could ChatGPT do my job? I pumped out one-pagers on management topics my teammates and I might have produced, plus poems and rap songs about them. My colleagues eyes widened.I felt unprepared for what lay ahead. I discovered that Google had published "Attention is All You Need" with the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) technology that ChatGPT uses. That added to my despair - but also my hope. If we came up with it, couldn't we put it to use, too?
My son offered a solution. "Mom, if you study a few college math topics, you could understand the math behind AI. You could read papers published in the field." He handwrote a page of recommendations. Tracing through topics in pre-calculus, trigonometry, calculus, multivariable calculus, and finally linear algebra, he charted my path to decoding neural networks. From there, he assured me that I could comprehend the attention mechanisms used by Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. He lovingly named it "A Curriculum for Curiosity" - and it became my new mission in life.
