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There is no Boat

You’ve Missed The Boat

I recently posted on LinkedIn about how I was laid off at Cisco (woohoo!). In this post I briefly detailed my intent to pivot fully into AI/ML going forward. This probably sounds a bit nauseating, since AI is the buzzword of the millennium. What I found most interesting, however, was the response from some random person on LinkedIn that I have no connection with.

Here’s what they said:

“You’re late to AI/ML.

Attention is All You Need paper is from 8 years ago. The bubble will pop and the real uses will emerge a year or two later. Look for related papers on arxiv to get a feel for state-of-the-art (aka SOTA).

Head over to 3Blue1Brown for a video series and look at Berkeley CS188 to understand the basic unit of a neural net, the perceptron.”

The Core Issue

There are a number of (incorrect) assumptions being made about my experience level. However, it’s this that I want to focus on:

You’re late to AI/ML.

Here’s another fun one I came across recently:

Lol good luck, getting into AI in 2025 is like starting a web firm in February 2000.

If we had to summarize the sentiment behind these, what might that be? Maybe:

You’ve missed the boat.

There is no Boat

I don’t believe in boats. This idea that you’ve somehow missed out on something in the world of ML is absurd. It makes one major assumption. That your goal is to get in at the ground floor to make money. At least that is the obvious interpretation here. My personal reasoning for getting into AI is that I believe it’s really the most important technology in the history of the species. On one hand you could sit around grumbling about change and being annoyed at all the hype. You could claim that AGI isn’t possible, or that it won’t come nearly as fast as the tech bros in Silicon Valley claim.

The AGI Uncertainty Principle

No one actually knows what will definitively happen. We’ve seen the leaders in Silicon Valley overestimate the pace of progress many times. But I can look back before ChatGPT and say I never saw the current state of things coming. I knew about AI/ML and I thought it was interesting, but it seemed like this arcane thing that had niche applications. The only thing I know for sure is this, and you can quote me:

The more sure someone is about AGI, the less you should believe them.

The truth is, AGI is an unsolved research problem. Not just how to achieve AGI, but whether or not AGI is even possible. We’re deep in theoretically unproven territory with multiple branching unknowns about consciousness, quantum mechanics, and AI architectures.

Is AGI possible?
No
Current AI tools still have massive economic impact
Yes
Is consciousness quantum?
No
Point for AGI, but LLMs may not get us there
Yes
Can we approximate it?
No
Quantum computing required
Yes
Will it be LLMs?
No
Let's work on alternatives
Yes
Keep going! Scaling laws!

Finding Purpose Beyond Uncertainty

What we can see here is that we are many levels deep into theoretically unproven territory when we even ask the simple question “Is AGI Possible?”. For myself though, it almost is irrelevant. My goal isn’t jump onto the boat and dive off in time to make money before the economy burns to the ground as AGI takes over everything or global wars spin up over resources. I am one small cog in the immensely complex machine that is this living organism we call the earth. If AGI isn’t coming due to either it not being possible in our physical reality or because the engineering work to achieve real AGI will take hundreds or thousands of years, I still want to be involved. The current tooling is already useful enough to work on some groundbreaking things.

If you ask me, for a certain very narrow definition of “General Intelligence”, LLMs probably get pretty close. And if AGI is possible? Then we need ethically minded people involved that want to help humanity prosper. I’m not going to sit around while the rest of the world slowly approaches an inflection point and just hope for the best. I’m going to learn as much as I possibly can so that I can make use of these tools to do as much good in the world as I feasibly can. Maybe that looks like making developer tools to help researchers working on meaningful problems make faster progress. Maybe that looks like eventually getting into the world of science and helping researchers make progress in a very narrow domain, like Quantum Computing, Cancer Research, Genetics, or whatever.

The Electricity Analogy

As a thought experiment to keep this post short, one of the new common phrases you hear around is this.

Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity

Interesting! Electricity was discovered (arguably) by Ben Franklin in like 1750. Tesla made his contributions in the late 19th century. Companies were benefiting and capitalizing on that technology in the 1880s, and manufacturing took off in the 1930s. The two power/electric companies in my area that are massive formed in 1967 and 1925. Someone should have told them how late they were to catch the boat! Maybe they wouldn’t have bothered building their billion dollar businesses.

Actually, when researching for this I did discover that my analogy there kind of falls apart if you dig into the hyper-detailed history of these companies, but I think the point remains valid. And in fact these companies going back to the beginning proves my point in a way as well. Maybe electricity has been consolidated into the hands of a few powerful companies, similar to the state of frontier/foundation models in the modern era. People are still finding new ways to take advantage of electricity to help the world.

The world doesn’t stop the millisecond that AGI shows up. Ironically AGI might already be here, again depending on your definition. Am I supposed to sit around just working my day job and hoping for the best without concern? Will I cease to be an intellectual that’s interested in how these technologies work and the applications of them as soon as OpenAI starts doing AGI victory laps or whatever? Obviously not. The world will continue, and the applications of these technologies will be fundamentally transformative. I want to be as well positioned as I can to help the world.

The Guitar Lesson: Process Over Outcome

As an avid guitarist, this all reminds me of another thing you see in the AI world. With the advent of GenAI models making music, I’ve seen someone say something like this in a youtube comment somewhere:

AI is depressing, there’s no point in doing art anymore. Can’t believe I wasted all that time learning production and piano…

This reminds me of why I play guitar daily: not to compete with AI or other musicians, but because the process itself brings me joy. The same applies to engineering and AI work.

For me, engineering and AI fall into this same sort of model. They aren’t just a means to an ends, but rather a part of the process. I don’t want to sit on my hands collecting a UBI one day, I want to work as hard as I can to acquire knowledge and tools and use those skills to do the most meaningful and impactful work that I can. This has been my goal since the beginning of my career, although I wasn’t always capable of articulating it quite so clearly. I might be the worst guitarist on the planet, and yet I will keep playing. I might get outpaced as an engineer, and yet I will keep working.

The Journey Continues

Keep your head up. You didn’t miss the boat. There is no boat. There was never a boat. Dig in, start learning, and figure out what you want to do with your life. Ironically in the age of AI we have more tools at our disposal than ever to dream big dreams and make an impact.

Resources: If Any of These Ideas Interest You

If anything in this post resonated with you, here are some excellent resources to dive deeper into AI/ML, consciousness research, career philosophy, and the intersection of technology and humanity:

🧠 AI/ML Learning Resources

📚 Philosophy of AI & Consciousness

🎯 Career Philosophy & Learning

🔬 Research & Academic Resources

💡 AI Safety & Ethics

For more curated AI/ML resources, tutorials, and learning paths, check out my AI/ML page.

Remember: The journey is the destination. Pick what interests you most and start there. You haven’t missed any boat – you’re exactly where you need to be.

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