The Power of AI - MSCC Meetup

I attended the MSCC meetup this month titled “The Power of AI”. It's always fun to show and meet tech geeks during the MSCC meetups.

I missed the first session but made it on time for the second one !

Neelesh Nursiah spoke about Natural Language Processing. While the presentation made a lot of sense, I must admit this topic still confuses me as it feels like we're taking inputs and passing them into black boxes to get outputs.

As someone who usually writes the code that gets executed, I feel like I must learn at least some of those algorithms that operate in the black boxes to fully appreciate what's going on.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clearly, I need to dig into this more. It was nice to get a headstart!

Chervine had a very awesome demo in which he combined Azure Cognitive search and Open API apis to be able to query multiple pdfs and get short answers. Needless to say, this was quite mind-blowing. Being able to throw a bunch of complicated bank pdfs at the system and as "Which bank has the best interest rate" is incredibly appealing and useful. We all understand this is just the beginning and what's coming next is very exciting.

Joki reassured the students who will likely be junior engineers soon they are not being replaced by AI, and they should keep being enthusiastic about getting into tech. I share the sentiment fully about them not having to be worried.

I personally do not see AI tools as Junior replacements but more like that senior engineer I wish I had on my team and to whom, If I can ask the right questions, somehow, always has the answer.