Employees can futureproof their careers if they learn AI’s fundamental concepts today, but risk becoming replaceable “generalists” if they bury their heads in the sand, the President of Rakuten Symphony's Cloud Business Unit has said.
As part of a wide-reaching conversation on Inside Track, the employee-facing live series, Partha Seetala underlined the reasons why he is now leading a lecture series designed to teach the fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence. Seetala is now committed to passing on his decades of expertise in a career that has seen him build the world’s most advanced telecom edge cloud – also soon to be enhanced with AI.
“I cannot emphasise this enough: it is very important that people educate themselves about AI - as users of it and as builders of things through the use of it,” he said. “Those that don't do that will be left behind, because there are tools that will essentially replace people who are not caught up with the times. If you are comfortable with what you're doing right now, I think that that should be a cause for concern, because the comfort zone is where dreams go to die. People who use these tools efficiently will be able to produce higher quality results at a much faster pace. They will be able to attract more customers and solve more use cases.”
The first series of Seetala’s lectures covered introductory concepts around neural networks, solving different types of classification, regression problems and understanding how to tune neural networks. Subsequent seasons will cover natural language processing, as a ‘precursor’ to the transformer architecture, he said. Seetala acknowledged on his Inside Track episode that these core concepts are intimidating for many, but urged viewers to be proactive and start small before expanding their learning.
“Let's not kid ourselves - AI is a pretty deep, complex field,” he said. “It has quite a bit of math that could put people off, and there is a level of elitism that exists among people who know the field, where they discuss it in excessive amounts of jargon – both those things make the subject seem inaccessible. However, I think AI should be viewed with a level of optimism - I can use this new tech to do really creative and cool stuff.
“Of course, you have to invest your time to figure out what it is. Start with some fundamentals - understanding what neural networks are. You can start with using something like Llama or LangChain, and build out something like a chatbot. You get a feel for what this thing can do. If you're a curious person by nature, you'd say, ‘this is really cool, how does it really work, and how can I apply this to my work?’ Then you can dig deeper.”
Seetala stressed how AI’s ability to deliver zero marginal cost – where the cost of one production unit is zero – is the biggest risk to replacing traditional human expertise, even in fields that demand high levels of qualification and knowledge. Contract checking and due diligence within the legal industry are just one example of work that could soon be replaced. “Within one minute and with about 10 cents of compute cost, I could have an answer that would’ve taken three hours to source from a $500-per-hour-lawyer,” he said. “That’s 15,000 times faster. The same goes for examples across every industry - fast forward five years and we can't envision what kind of productivity gains you'll start to see.
“We are just scratching the surface of AI’s impact - the economic value that it delivers will exceed other hyped technologies like blockchain or crypto. I think it is real. Those in the age 30-60 bracket have seen the Internet and mobile revolutions and how society changed as a result. It's very rare to see three of these revolutions, but we are definitely about to see the next one.”
Seetala also emphasized how “generalists” who shy away from learning the fundamental concepts of AI put themselves at risk of being replaced by a tool that could learn the core concepts of their role. He laid out a choice for viewers - become experts that can enhance their work with AI, or risk being imitated by a machine.
“If you can intersect useful domain expertise - engineering, marketing, sales, whatever it is – with an AI-ML toolkit, I think you can create magic,” he said. “That is where the differentiation is. If you're a generalist just doing coding, let me tell you this right now - it will be very difficult to have a successful career going forward, because that is the one area that AI will replace. But I don’t think you'll be replaced as long as you have domain depth.
“The obvious question is, because these things are so smart, can they learn your domain? Yes, they can, and they will. This is where I think you have to take a leap of faith and learn AI concepts because we do not know how use cases will evolve over time.”
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, according to Seetala. He believes the Internet offers the most recent example of why innovative technologies will create more jobs than they remove. “In the late 90s, everybody thought it would just be something that saved them a trip to the library,” he said. “Almost nobody imagined some of the ways it would change our lives – banking, booking airline tickets, e-commerce. That is the nature of disruptive technology. History is a great guide, because it tells us that when there is disruption, human creativity kicks in, and a very different set of use cases will start to emerge. Those who build the right expertise will be able to leverage them.
“When the Internet came about, everything changed - networking, databases, storage systems and architectures. It became a question of ensuring hundreds and thousands of people could connect at the same time. That created a huge opportunity for people building out these systems. All these systems that we have built in the past have to be redone for this new world. There's a lot of opportunity there.”
