The Guru Trap: A Recurring Story
"I lost everything chasing stock market gurus doing their courses and investing in stock market." is a painful scream we get to hear from time to time where gullible folks fall prey to social-media influencers' trap, thus losing money on their courses and from blind faith in their advice on which stock to invest in. Who were the winners and losers of this game? The companies and influencers were winners. The retail investors were losers. (Aside: India is fortunate to have observant regulators who took note of such incidents at large scale and have tightened their noose against fraudulent influencers drastically reducing the incidents rate to miniscule levels from where it was.)
"Agile is dead" are loud conclusions we hear from many corporations that tried its adoption in vain by hiring Agile specialists who were considered experts after week-end courses and certification from some unSAFe body. Who were the winners and whiners in this case? The companies ended up being whiners. The certification body and the certified specialists that rode the wave are winners.
From stock market gurus to unSAFe Agile experts, the tech world has seen its share of bubbles. Now, a new one is inflating -- the Generative AI gurus. GenAI surely has been making more than waves after the Tsunami of announcements made by tech giants competing against each other, promising a new world order with its adoption. The result? Companies fell prey to it, and some even displaced good percentage of its workforce even before adopting GenAI and seeing the results of it. The age old wisdom, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch" is ignored by the leaders who fell for the "Magical Promises of Tech Titans". But hey in this wave and era of social media, the money and fame craving tech influencers and edutechs are promising N-day courses to make even non-tech folks experts in GenAI by just attending their expensive $$$ courses. I leave it to you to decide who are the winners and losers of this bubble.
My Journey: Learning by reading, building, conceptualizing, and writing
The stories of these bubbles are eerily similar, and I couldn't help but draw parallels with my own journey on a few endeavors in the past few years.
It is only in the last couple of years I transitioned from a passive long-term investor in stock market to becoming a casual but active investor wanting to learn more and more about stock trading. One thing led to the other that kept me trying different things in stock market and as a side-effect build SDKs to do algorithmic trading too.
In in similar manner, the last couple of years I doubt if anyone hasn't heard or tried their hands on GenAI, for its virality is unprecedented. From being an extensive end-user of GenAI systems (like ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, etc) to building purposeful GenAI apps as hobbyist, I have mixed feelings for it, as with anything else that I usually have. It is in my very nature to constantly question my own opinions and thought process, to discover gaps, unlearn, re-learn and learn something anew. After expending much of my time in this to form an opinion, I started writing my lessons from some such experiments (please do check my earlier blog posts for more on this).
Navigating the GenAI Wave
Here are some of my thoughts on how one can gear-up for seizing the opportunities with GenAI:
- Unlike Agile, GenAI is invasive and has deep penetration into the very system of software development. With Coding Agents in place, even the very fundamentals of engineering practices are questioned and discussed today. I witnessed developers questioning on clean-coding practices and unit tests, when it is the coding agent that is generating and refactoring all code. This has some serious ramifications in its outcomes and we shall learn more about it sooner than later.
- After Cloud tech that became the de-facto standard today, GenAI will have its applications in many critical areas of businesses making it the de-facto standard there. Right now because of its virality, it is force implemented in many areas without much return on investment, burning the $$$ bills of the company.
Take for instance of how this is employed in E-commerce platforms that summarize the comments a product received in terms like "some, most, many, etc." without quantifying on various metrics for good decision making of a customer. This to me is namesake product management that is busy in bloating the product with features to fill up appraisal cycle documents on their achievements. If an e-commerce company is going to call itself a GenAI company for such features, I can only feel so sorry for it.
Watch out for new features in the everyday services that you use, leveraging GenAI. Think "How it helps you as its end-user?" and also think "How it helps the company in offering it to you?", for the complete picture. - The evolution of GenAI in the past couple of years is phenomenal in every aspect that it sure is promising and should keep all of us on our toes in keeping up with its impact. I experienced first-hand of how smartly some companies have leveraged chat-bots in managing its customer support, taking hybrid approach to GenAI surpassing the constraints of the LLM model they employ. The team sure connected the dots well enough for me to draw some inspiration from them.
- If you have not started so far, it is about time you can get started for the dust is settling down, and the APIs are getting standardized. This should be the good news you likely wanted to hear.
- Most of the influencers are cashing in on their current or past company's brand selling you courses or webinars that are too abstract ideas, disconnected topics and theories devoid of practical lab exercises that you can follow along. Be warned of losing your money to such "become an expert quickly" schemes. Take it for granted that if you don't do it, you won't get it.
- To take things to the next level, start building one to get a hang of it, braving all the odds of stale code, code generated by hallucinated GPT agents, etc. Nearly all the courses and codes shared in your social media is likely broken because of breaking changes in evolving APIs. This will be your biggest deterrent and you will have to surpass this by getting your hands dirty, banging your head on why it is broken, to figuring your way out of this mess. This sure is a bad news that you don't want to hear. But then it is what it is and so take it head on. And yes, this eats your time like crazy before you even realize it. See it as an investment in yourself as motivation.
- When you are working through the course material (I have bias for materials from the makers themselves) see if you can connect the dots of the GenAI design and how it challenges the current status-quo at your work place. For the later, you will have to introspect your experience to discover the hidden gems.