Tech Salaries, Fine Tuning AI, and Communicating Better

Weekly Roundup of AI, Technology, and UX

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Here’s the best from this week in product, UX, AI and technology news. As well as some product applications. Let’s go:

• 🤑 Tech Salaries

• 🎦 Netflix $900k

• 🗣️ AI Speech

• 🎯 Fine Tuning

• 💬 Communicate Better

• 👩‍💻 Coding

News and Useful Reads

Big Tech salaries revealed: This is what developers, engineers, and product managers make at Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon

If you’ve been in the job market or know people who work at some of the big tech companies, these numbers aren’t too surprising. They don’t show the full packages, but should give you an idea of the best and worst (ahem, SpaceX) companies for pay. Though, as I’ve been discussing with many colleagues, pay isn’t everything. So it may not be worth it to chase those big bucks if you are going to be miserable.

What Netflix’s $900k product manager job tells us about AI

Of course, we can’t ignore the massive salary we saw recently for Netflix. Product management will probably continue to pivot and shift, but given the flexibility of the role, I’d expect more roles like this, and a huge focus on AI.

So what’s the future of product management going to be? Granted, there’s a lot of possible outcomes in the space between outright role elimination vs. elevating the PM to near seven-figure salary status. Nevertheless, what to take from the Netflix story is that AI will play an outsize role in the future of product management. And effective product leadership will be instrumental to any successful business effort leveraging AI.

How Artificial Intelligence Gave a Paralyzed Woman Her Voice Back

This is exactly the hopeful application we hope to see more of: using AI to help with injuries or disabilities. And how soon will we see these types of applications more generally? Allowing for different communication than we’ve experienced before.

It is the first time that either speech or facial expressions have been synthesized from brain signals. The system can also decode these signals into text at nearly 80 words per minute, a vast improvement over the 14 words per minute

GPT-3.5 Turbo fine-tuning and API updates

Customizability for AI is increasing rapidly. And while it may not outperform GPT-4 immediately, the ability to more easily customize AI in general is going to be one of the most powerful use cases.

Fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo is now available, with fine-tuning for GPT-4 coming this fall. This update gives developers the ability to customize models that perform better for their use cases and run these custom models at scale. Early tests have shown a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 Turbo can match, or even outperform, base GPT-4-level capabilities on certain narrow tasks.

Some Weird Tips for Working Faster

I liked this post about working faster and communicating better. There are few things I hate more than getting “hi” in Slack or Teams. I’ll likely ignore those messages until I’m certain you will not follow up with more info. Communicate in full chunks!

Communicating in full chunks allows people to process your request instead of following up for clarification

Do the extra work to communicate clearly and with empathy

Spoon feed requests and to make them happen faster

Podcasts

Accelerating your Career

Speaking of careers and possible career changes, getting outside coaching can be a great step toward finding a new role. I discussed this on a podcast with Zach White:

We don’t have to wait for something massive to happen to us, but can use life’s little signals to understand when we need to change. Often that means getting an outside perspective, like a coach, to help accelerate your career. 

Useful Tools and Resources

Kombai - Coding from Figma

The no-code or low-code movement is going to continue to gain steam. And AI tools will be a huge part of it. I’ve been experimenting with Kombai, which can take a Figma file and generate the code for it. It’s fascinating, and could speed up development massively.

The number of coding tools that are surfacing is incredible to me. Not only do they allow anyone to get started, but they allow experienced developers to scale their impact. Exciting stuff.