In any job, I always feel that I'm not enough, that I don't know enough, like a fish climbing a tree. An odd way to start. Well, over the years, though, I've been discovering who I am, for better and for worse, and what I enjoy doing in my personal life and at work.
By luck, and, I believe, not on merit, I worked with people who taught me a great deal and gave me the chance to work in technology. And so I managed to reconcile chronic impostor syndrome with a genuine interest in what I do. Learning about the field became something I enjoyed.
Soon after "Attention is All You Need" and before GPT-3, I decided to dive headfirst into a postgraduate course in Data Science and AI, arguing that "it would be fun". In retrospect, it wasn't. Nevertheless, I did learn a great deal. And, shortly afterwards, I was lucky, once again, to be able to work with and on AI. Since then, keeping up with everything that happens, thinking and learning as much as I can has been almost an obsession. Not (only) because I still think I don't know enough, not just because I enjoy it, but because I feel like a paparazzo frantically photographing a veritable tsunami. A tsunami that has been growing, freezing over, and growing again for almost 80 years. Perhaps, as a society, we can rebuild creatively after it has passed (wink wink Schumpeter). Perhaps it isn't a tsunami at all, but something more positive. What is certain is that I'm following it and will continue to do so.
So, because I miss writing, and because the opportunity cost of writing these ramblings on paper at night is lower than reviving the podcast (or starting a new one), I intend this space to be where I share my notes, mainly on AI, without ruling out articles I might write for other outlets.
Incidentally, a good use case for said AI is translation, so everything I publish will be translated into all the languages on this site. I do this for convenience, out of incompetence (I can't write in Japanese), and because I find it mildly amusing that this would have been unthinkable a few years ago. So all translations will be labelled "Written by a Human, translated by AI". Sometimes I'll get technical, sometimes I won't. My commitment (to myself) is that these texts will be written exclusively by me. See you soon.