BONUS: Working in AI with Damian Lowe

The Evolving Leader

In this bonus episode of The Evolving Leader, host Jean Gomes speaks with Damian Lowe, a senior software engineer at Symphony AI. They discuss how many of us have moved beyond the initial reactions to services like ChatGPT towards a current phase focused on experimenting, learning, and building. Damian shares that for programmers, AI tools like large language models (LLMs) are already providing a tangible 10-20% productivity gain for tasks like code suggestions and reviews, noting that both the technology and human adaptation are still maturing. However he adds that while AI excels at basic or medium tasks, its performance degrades quickly at higher complexity levels, often producing "nonsense," and he emphasizes that effective adaptation requires not just better prompting, but a crucial understanding of the difference between how machines "think" (based on probabilities) and how humans think.

Looking ahead, Damian is optimistic that within 3-5 years AI could make many jobs significantly easier, potentially reducing "grunt work" and fostering more creativity through effective human-machine collaboration. He underscores the importance for leaders in helping teams understand AI's capabilities and limits, encouraging experimentation, and stresses the need to maintain critical thinking and human skills alongside AI adoption.

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Chapters

1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. How has AI shaped your career and changed how you think about things? (00:02:26)

3. How is AI changing your job? (00:06:09)

4. How has AI changed your productivity? (00:07:38)

5. Where are we in the hype cycle? (00:09:13)

6. What do people need to do to be in partnership with AI? (00:10:46)

7. What should we not be wasting our time on? (00:12:32)

8. The technology has been humanised so we start to think of it as a human being and expect it to do things that it can’t possibly do. (00:15:26)

9. Making specialised models is very important by taking off the shelf models and adding in your own knowledge sources. (00:16:33)

10. How secure is your ip if you add it into an AI model? (00:17:25)

11. Your thoughts on what AI’s proliferation is going to lead to in the work place. (00:19:08)

12. The challenges that help leaders enable their teams to build a productive relationship with AI. (00:20:50)

13. We talk about making work more, not less human. How do we maintain that when using AI? (00:23:47)

14. What else should we be talking about with regard to AI? (00:25:35)

15. If you were talking to school children about what you’ve learnt, what would your advice be? (00:27:00)

16. Asking AI to ask us questions. (00:29:19)

17. Machines don’t have their own consciousness, but they do have what we’ve trained them on, so it can have bias. (00:31:39)

18. What’s the skillset that we need to adopt in shifting our thinking around relating to something with no self-awareness? (00:34:13)

19. What are you excited about with AI? (00:37:52)