In today's fast-paced world, staying ahead of the curve is essential. At Dell, we actively encourage and empower our team members to leverage cutting-edge AI tools, which make a significant difference in achieving remarkable results.

Today, Iam, a Senior Advisor in Data Science, shares his story and testimonial. Having experienced firsthand the transformative power of AI tools in his daily work, Iam's rich background in data science and AI engineering provides valuable insights. He highlights how AI has revolutionized his approach to productivity and efficiency, enabling him to navigate complex tasks with ease and achieve outstanding outcomes. Discover the incredible potential that AI holds, how it empowers our team, and elevates our work.

How would you describe your overall experience with the AI tools?

Overall, my experience with AI tools has been very rewarding. For context, I first had contact with AI tools around 2014, when only very specialized people could use them, and even then, the performance was not optimized. The tools that exist now are in a totally different league of usability, usefulness, and performance, all while typically requiring comparatively less setup to get going. For instance, if you’re working with a text-related task, it is possible to achieve some things nowadays by just asking a model to do something in plain English, which in the past would have required you to be specialized in a complex NLP (Natural Language Processing) library. Any time a new AI tool is released, it takes some hands-on trial and error to familiarize yourself, but as you do, you start figuring out which use-cases click the most with which tool and start incorporating those into your workflow.

What role does AI play in your daily work?

AI acts as a productivity multiplier for me, serving as an assistant that enhances my efficiency. With the right tools, I can generate results and absorb useful information faster. Nowadays, you can provide very large, unfamiliar documents and codebases to models or agents and receive actionable insights and useful explanations almost immediately. Additionally, you can automate or accelerate repetitive parts of many coding tasks.

What are the main benefits you notice when using AI tools for your tasks or role?

My tasks are in the fields of data science and AI engineering. The key benefit I've noticed is timesaving and increased productivity. I feel that I can accomplish tasks faster without compromising on other factors. For data science tasks, this includes automating boilerplate for frequently performed analyses. For AI Engineering tasks, new tools and methods (often accompanied by papers) are released by the dozen every month, and they are not always extensively or easily documented. Using AI assistance to navigate through unfamiliar code and complex technical passages has allowed me to quickly determine which tools may be useful to me.

What are the biggest advancements or most innovative moments you’ve experienced empowered by the use of AI?

There have been many "a-ha moments" where I felt that AI tools had significantly improved, with each new wave of models often feeling like a substantial step forward. Since time seems to pass so quickly in the AI field, it's easy to forget that just about three years ago, models could typically handle only around 4,000 tokens of context. This meant you had to choose your input extremely carefully, and even then, they could still make many mistakes. Those models were still massive improvements over the first ones I used in 2014.

As a counterpoint, just the other week, I tested a recent model by giving it the entire text of my thesis, which is over 100 pages long and written in Portuguese, and asking it questions in English. It answered remarkably well. Tools like this have never existed before in history. Some of the repositories I work on nowadays can fit entirely within the context of a state-of-the-art model. It's a new and exciting reality.

Another example where I felt empowered by AI was when I didn't understand a concept or part of a complex technique and found that the existing explanations were insufficient to resolve my questions. Being able to ask as many questions as necessary to a strong LLM (Large Language Model), adding as many references as needed, feels like a powerful use case as well.

How do you perceive the future use of AI in your work and in the company industry as a whole?

In my work, I expect AI to continue increasing my efficiency and productivity, amplifying what I can achieve within a given time frame. More generally, I believe the AI tools that already exist can provide significant performance boosts in many relevant use cases, such as coding, information processing, and content generation. More people will become familiar with these tools and incorporate them into their workflows. Simultaneously, the tools will keep improving, becoming more useful and more usable in an expanding number of scenarios.

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