My Journey with AI

In 2022, OpenAI released the GPT-3.5 model. I was still at university then. Now I am using Opus 5.5 to solve problems at work. AI has developed incredibly fast, but we humans adapt just as fast, so it doesn’t seem to feel like a big change. Yet only a few years ago we were used to searching for information in all kinds of browsers and designing posters by hand. There was no AI music or AI film back then. Something made in a few minutes today may be finer than what took several days a few years ago. Productivity is changing, and the value of what we produce is changing with it.

First, AI grew a brain. From humanity’s vast body of data, from poems and novels, papers and news reports, even online shouting matches, it learned to predict the probability of each word appearing in a sentence. With each iteration it has mastered knowledge that is hard for humans to master, and on that basis it goes on to discover what we have not yet grasped.

Then came hands. In fact, I had wanted to build a website for a long time. In high school I roughly put together a web page of my own with WordPress. I didn’t understand computers or how any of it worked; I just followed guides step by step. Later AI appeared, and whatever I didn’t understand, I could simply ask it. It might not understand what I meant and often went off track, but its knowledge was broad, and I learned a lot about building websites from it.

In 2024 I started using Cursor, and I had hands: a programmer’s hands. It could be imprecise too, and I still didn’t understand how things worked, but I could use it to change the architecture of my website. I gained a great deal of freedom. Before, I could only follow tutorials or make small adjustments to ready-made themes; now I could have it carry out my ideas. It saved me a lot of time as well. At least it does well with whatever it can reach, and whatever it can’t, I handle myself.

Then AI grew legs: agents. They can walk about and connect things freely, like bridges linking different islands so that cotton from island A can be shipped to island B and made into winter clothes. I no longer have to make every connection myself. I only give an instruction, have it build a bridge between websites and platforms, and they can work together across platforms, freeing my hands completely.

Ha, I’ll stop here for now. But AI really is developing quickly, and it’s only natural that all kinds of jobs are being replaced. As the means of production advance, education has to keep up with the times. Becoming an expert certainly matters, but I think in the future there are qualities that will need to be cultivated far more widely.