The 10x Executive: Leading the Charge in the AI-Driven Future
How Senior Executives Can Harness the Power of Generative AI for Unprecedented Success
Remember that childhood game where you'd try to guess how many jelly beans were in a jar? Well, welcome to the jelly bean game of the future – except the jar is now filled with AI-driven innovations, and the winners are those who can predict and harness their power.
Winds of Change
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen" -Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
The world just took a spin on the ChatGPT rollercoaster, and it's been a wild ride. Launched on Nov 30, 2022, this “data product” shattered records like a rockstar smashing guitars, hitting one million users in a mere 5 days and soaring to 100 million monthly active users in a lightning-fast 2 months (the nearest competitor TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 Mn in MAU). It was the first General Purpose AI that people could play around with, so the reaction was obvious.
The creativeness, hype, and coverage this generated reached a crescendo last week – there were practically one high impact announcement after another every other day:
Midjourney announced v5 which takes photo realistic images to next level.
Google announced PaLM based GenAI functionality added to Google Apps.
GPT-4, the big kahuna, made its grand entrance - now multimodal and ready to rumble.
Microsoft announced CoPilot to Office 365.
We may not realize it, but the world order when it comes to technology has been changed forever. Things will never be the same again. And that brings some serious questions to most companies and their leaders as they start thinking of their game plan in the face of the brave new GAI world.
The Great AI-piphany
"I fear the uninitiated might take this for cynicism, but I do not mean it so. I mean only that the highest reality lies in our limitations." - The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Picture this: you scribble something on a napkin, snap a photo, and voilà! GPT-4 turns it into working code. Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, right? Well, that future is now.
But let’s not stop there; check out this tweet thread from Joe Perkins diving deep into the GPT-4 rabbit hole:
There are more details in the the tweet thread (highly recommended to browse it) - but in short - the following is an output from one of the programs GPT-4 has created for him.
Pretty neat, huh?
Let’s try something else. Most technical folks would tell you one of the most omitted, boring and frustrating things to maintain in a codebase is documentation.
Here’s GPT-4 doing it easy peasy.
Now, you might argue this is good as a concept, but nobody is going to replace a programmer with GPT-4 now.
And I agree.
As impressive as this is, it is still a nifty party trick. Enterprise development teams work with much more complex code, which has dependencies to hundreds of microservices. Writing a new independent code is a cakewalk compared to editing two lines in one of those microservices for a bug fix. More bugs are going to pop up that Starship Troopers ever encountered on the planet Klendathu!
Keep in mind - this is an impressive start, but a start nonetheless. What it could do a year from now, two years from now, and five years from now? Programming job is largely creating text (code). A part of it could be considered creating text from specifications (aka images ) - and a multimodal system like GPT-4 can easily handle both. As of June 2022, Github CoPilot was used by nearly 1.2M developers and claimed to be improving their productivity by 1.55x. Things could be a lot different for Copilot now.
The landscape of products is going to explode in a year or two - and nothing will remain the same. Think of a "Full-Stack" Product Manager, who’s mostly focused on writing the spec, and making small changes to modify the boilerplate code by a GAI. She can be supported by another "Full-Stack" developer/devops person and you have a full fledged team!
Now, i know i focused a lot on product development here, because it’s close to my heart. But Ai doesn’t differentiate, you could be aynwhere, in any role
A Full-Stack Marketer could craft images with Midjurney and pen content with GPT-4.
Customer service reps and office workers team up with AI to streamline their tasks, making every day feel like Casual Friday.
A Radiologist could use AI to detect diseases they would otherwise miss, and do this a lot faster!
The times, they are a-changin', and the rise of the 10x professionals is upon us.
The Rise of the 10x Professional
“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” —Bill Gates
I see many people arguing now that AI won’t replace a professional.
And you are right. But it does not have to. What AI can do, and will do, is to give us superpowers.
Enter the 10x professionals. Like Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth, they'll use AI to supercharge their productivity, transforming into formidable forces of creativity and efficiency. And who wouldn't want to be a superhero? They'll enjoy more fulfilling work, higher earnings, and provide exceptional value to their organizations.
Remember when Marc Andreesen said "Software is eating the World" back in 2011? Well, Forbes declared in 2019, "Software Ate the World, and now AI is eating Software". Turns out, AI was just getting warmed up, like Pac-Man on a power pellet rampage, gobbling up every industry it encounters.
In this brave new world, organizations must channel their inner Andy Grove and stay lean, hungry, and ready to rumble. The AI-savvy competitors are coming, armed with cutting-edge tools and a thirst for innovation. Adapt, or you'll find yourself bringing a rubber chicken to a lightsaber duel.
So, what's the catch? Can everyone become a 10x professional? What happens to those who don't make the cut, the workplace "muggles" among AI-empowered wizards? Tough questions with no easy answers. But one thing's for sure: the future of work is bound to be nothing short of extraordinary.
AI Wars: The Future Strikes Back
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“ - William Gibson
The future seems to be in a hurry to reach us.
The entire workforce, managers, and society need to figure out GAI's potential to change our daily lives. Will it be a game-changer, or will the GAI hype fizzle out like a dud firework?
In the good old days, progress used to take its sweet time – remember the Industrial Revolution? A leisurely 80-year stroll through history. Computers took almost 50 years for them to make their way from vacuum tubes to our living rooms.
But now, GAI is hitting the fast-forward button, and we better buckle up.
It's tough to predict exactly how products and platforms will change, but let's dive into one mind-bending scenario. Picture this: data cleaning and connecting – the bane of our digital lives – suddenly become a non-issue. Poof! A GenAI model waves its magic wand and (virtually) connects all the data, answering your questions like a know-it-all genie. What happens to those platforms and tools built to solve this problem? Will they vanish into thin air, like Marty McFly's siblings in an altered timeline?
Imagine a GAI solution that can whip up marketing strategies and graphs with a few simple commands, like a master chef cooking up a gourmet meal. The implications are staggering – and possibly a little bit scary.
Embracing the Change
"In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety." - Abraham Maslow
There’s so many unanswered questions. Regulations are slower than a tortoise in molasses, and the tech world is sprinting like a caffeinated hare. We don’t know how this technology is going to impact society. We don’t know what announcements will come and dazzle us in the next 3 months.
As if that's not enough, we're facing a financial rollercoaster that would make Indiana Jones queasy. Silicon Valley Bank has taken a dive, and Credit Suisse is hobbling like a pirate with a peg leg. You want to play it safe, but remember what we said about waiting? That's like trying to win a game of Frogger by staying on the starting line – not gonna happen!
Because, as Yoda would say, "Do. Or do not. There is no try."
The jelly beans are spilling out of the jar – it's time to start counting!
Note: in keeping with the spirit of the article, all the images are crated using midjourney.
A good text! I think after the hype bursts Gen AI will be an excellent assistant for people who will see value in it and know how to use it well. Probably the differentiation will be about "lazy" and "advanced" use of it.
I liked all the pop culture references :)
I have my trust issues with GAI as it’s so confident when getting things wrong, although I’m sure this will get better with time (and maybe already has). I also believe that its best use, at least in the near future, will come in form of time-saving specialized tools that are incorporated in bigger systems. Coding assistant in your favorite IDE, slides with bullet points maker for your slides program with added stock photos like image generator as bonus, etc..