The good managers I saw also had this ability. The managers I didn't enjoy working with / saw struggle were ones who either never had that ability, or had lost it a long time ago.
Note I'm speaking about line management. There's a world of difference between managing a dozen or so individual contributors vs managing senior managers / directors. However, managing LLMs is analogous to line management.
I agree, but in my opinion, your point about needing to know how things work still holds. It's less relevant as you move up to managing managers and larger orgs, but it never goes to zero if you're going to be successful.
Because it is one thing to feel like you have learned something and another thing to have actually learned it well enough to put it in use. There are so many YouTube tutorials on all kinds of subject that will make you feel like an expert in the field after watching, and then you start doing the thing they have supposedly taught you and you can't remember a darn thing, because your "learning" was only ever skin deep and never meaningfully tested or reinforced.
To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples
1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase.
2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini
Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?
It definitely wasn't a single prompt, but two hours of back and forth, with a lot of time spent thinking (me, not LLM) in between. There were multiple times where I misunderstood something, so if I just read a book I'd probably get stuck many times.
I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.
I have many times asked it something I was slightly curious about, got the answer after the first or 2nd-3rd prompt, spent 3 minutes in total and forgot it after 15 minutes probably.
But a few times I've spent an hour or more on a topic, asking many questions, thinking between responses, and I actually learned something.
Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.
For better or worse, there's less friction now for seeing an answer to a question you have. You can ask in more arbitrary ways than Google required, and something will still come up. For looking up factoids, it's much faster. For picking up more complex topics, I'd say it's more or less the same, because you still have to spend time ruminating on the topic.
For myself, I have found that I am better able to learn new topics than ever before because being able to have a conversation with a moderately competent but sometimes catastrophically wrong AI about any new subject is actually the perfect mix of helpful and unhelpful for learning.
I use a loop along these lines:
* Ask a question * Get an answer * Be skeptical of the answer * Investigate/reason about the answer * Critique the answer * Rinse and repeat
This kind of loop is far more useful to me than any textbook ever has been, because a textbook just drips information into my head. It's more likely to be accurate, but not guaranteed, and it doesn't encourage me to actually engage with the material in the way that a wrong AI answer does.
One of the many reasons I'm determined to remain a luddite wrt AI. I hate the idea of being a manager and have refused promotions to avoid it in the past. I don't want to manage automatons any more than I want to manage people. I want to do stuff, not manage.
It is not like you have to give them fun parts of the job.
While being a team lead for people I actually have to do the opposite. Get interesting parts to hand over to people to keep them happy and pick mundane not interesting boilerplate myself.
It feels like this message of “offloading mundane tasks so you will have more time to do fun parts” is being pushed so hard, but in reality the opposite is happening. Fun parts are being offloaded while I’m left doing the soul sucking and mundane parts
I have that part covered by AI so I can get multiple servers up and running and then eventually fix some config or networking here and there which I like.
Instead of bashing my head against the wall.
How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
Which means as a human your only added value is on the edge of the distribution. Which means you need to be learning and doing more complex, deep topics.
An analogy that I think helps describe how I feel about it all:
AI is like having cheat codes in a video game. You don't have to try hard and develop a deep understanding of how the game works. You aren't challenged anymore and it doesn't feel like you earned winning the game.
It doesn't matter because nobody cares. Businesses truly do not care. You are a cog, a means to an end. It's only about "winning". Now it's no longer fun to play the game.
A cynical person would tell you that nothing has changed; this was always the way it was. AI didn't change anything in this regard. Maybe it just made it more apparent to you?