The thing that always confuses me about "learn AI" in reference to Chat-GPT is... What exactly is there to learn? It's a web terminal that you type queries into and it returns results. Learning how to coerce it into giving you what you want is certainly an art, but no more esoteric an art than using Google to correctly return a useful result to your query - it's a lot of trial/error and simple logic about how to get it to respond with something useful.
In the case where people think that they either already are or can rapidly become experts in NLP, language modeling, or other topics related to Machine Learning... Well that's just the Dunning-Kreuger effect on full display. While you may be able to develop rudimentary tools based on machine learning w.r.t. NLP, none of these lifetime React devs with "interest in the AI space" are doing anything close to that, or if they are, it falls amazingly short of a project like OpenAI's. At this point, AI is the new "data science" of 2023, a handy buzzword for laypeople to invoke when they want to gesture towards "high tech", and one that's frequently divorced from an advanced technical understanding about how training/using a service like ChatGPT works.
As a closing anecdote, a friend of mine (would be startup founder) recently showed me her business plan for a "AI powered music generation service" where users could use a ChatGPT like interface to compel the computer to give them a "lofi beat to relax and study to" or an "upbeat electronic track for a space exploration video game stream" for YouTube videos or producing other forms of license-free music. When I started digging into how this was going to be done, the furthest we got is:
> "You need to train a neural network on a tagged and curated list of music samples, and develop instruments to allow for additional human training/tagging and re-processing, in addition to developing a suite of MIDI -> audio tools (essentially a headless/distributed DAW) to actually produce music. "
Their response?
> We'll build the web interface first then we can iterate from there.
I'm not sure you can say that their attraction of youth is actually "natural" - as other subthreads here have suggested, Gen Z is considerably less interested in computing than my (millenial) generation was. When I was a teenager I was torrenting 100% of my media, tweaking and installing VST's in Ableton's Max for Live to make music, hacking my school district's crappy computer security system to get onto a proxy and play video games in the library, and then figuring out how to code in Powershell so I could bot on those games.. the list goes on. Me and my friends thought we were Epic Trolls and hackers - I think that image has been relegated to the "cringe" bin of history, the same way that people look at pictures of themselves wearing leather jackets with teased hair from the 80's and go - Look! Look how ridiculous I was back then! Times have changed.
I think for a certain segment of the population born between 1980 and 1995, mostly male gamer/geek type personalities (and believe me, I do cringe at the person I believed I was in 2006 when I was doing all of this stuff), computers were and remain attractive because of the stereotypical associations with the Hacker/slacker archetype - the cultural milieu consistent with The Matrix, online video games, shows like the I.T. crowd, musicians like Aphex Twin and Radiohead, fantasy and sci-fi ranging from the more primitive Dwarf Fortress and Lord of The Rings to the fast-paced cyberpunk of Counter Strike and Snow Crash.
I'm not particularly "hip" but a lot of the mystique and glory of the Hacker seems to have worn off with kids these days - gaming and mobile phones are ubiquitous and easy to use, where they used to only be for the "hardcore nerds". Tech startups full of people like me when I was 18 have taken over the world (unfortunately, I was not one of them) and they seem to have done their fair share of harm.
I know that computer science remains popular as a career avenue to make money for young people, but I'm not sure that they're particularly passionate about it in the way that some people my age and older are. When I was into it as a self-styled "outcast" neckbeard teenager, I was into it because of the cultural connotations and the associations marketed to me as a young man in the "hacker" heyday. Imagine telling me or any young "geek" type guy in 2005 that when I was 35 that I would be a systems engineer working with ex-frat bro type guys on the hardest problems I have ever approached - I probably would have scoffed and told you that there's no way such a small mind could ever approach the mathematics and algorithms needed to REALLY be an engineer (again, cringe, but true). Yet here I am, and it's great.
Suffice it to say that I don't think there's anything uniquely young or male about computing or computers, and that the culture around them is completely free to morph and shift as
I agree, quite accessible, despite its length. I personally would not recommend skipping the footnotes. Though they are a pain, they frequently add so much color and deeply-nested, parenthetical humor to the book. Occasionally you need to look up a word (which is always worth it, because he really knows how to pick the right word), occasionally you get bored in the middle of one of "those" chapters (likely an inevitability that you get some ups and some downs in a 1,000+ page book).
But I totally agree that it just gets more and more relevant and poignant. And completely hilarious. I think that part of the book (and his writing in general0 is undersold. Some of the passages are amusing because of their literary references and wordplay, some are laugh-out-loud funny, the type of stuff that you'll have to read back to someone else immediately because of the extreme mirth you just experienced reading it.