Many, many years ago I implemented a neural network as part of my PhD in natural language understanding. I developed a semantic embedding model, and predicted the next structure using softmax.

Then I left uni, got a real job, and barely touched language processing again. Most work in data science was direct marketing, and was based on transaction and interaction data. I vaguely tracked the literature on text processing, but more out of habit than anything.

It’s been incredible to watch the advance of LLMs from the sidelines. BERT was my wake up call. When it came out in 2018, I realised all my ‘old ways’ of doing NLP were now redundant and it was time for me to upskill. Still, life got in the way and I was busy with work, so that it wasn’t until last year that I really sat down and got my head around all the advances in the field.

I don’t want to get into the technical side of LLMs here and now. What I want to focus on is how much of an enabler they are for work. I learned programming way back in the 1980s but I was never terribly good. I wrote programs to get a task done rather than production-grade code intended to live for years. As my work has shifted into consulting, I’d largely dropped programming beyond a couple hundred line script.

That’s changed with LLMs. I can ask it to fix up my syntax, scan my code for bugs, or look up API documentation for me. It’s all stuff I can do without a LLM but the difference in time between me stumbling through Stackoverflow vs me asking a LLM is roughly an order of magnitude.

In the last six months I’ve completed an app for syncing my bank transactions from Open Banking (Akahu) to YNAB, and am about half way through an app for smart scheduling of tasks. I’ve also implemented SMS inside Open Dental, and generally used it to make myself faster at work.

It’s hard to overstate how much difference this is going to make in the world. I think the productivity of ‘knowledge worker’ is going to double almost overnight. WIll that mean more is produced? Mass redundancies?

Anyway, I’m certainly enjoying being able to work faster.

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