Communication Rules Everything Around Me
The role of communication becomes ever more important in one full of large language models.
One of the realizations that I’ve had as I’ve begun to explore the latest AI models more and more is that to get the best results out of these models, you have to clearly define what you want them to do. In other words, getting what you want out of these models is a lot like communicating with human beings.
This makes sense given that they were trained on a large swath of human communications in the first place. And while it sounds obvious that communicating clearly is important, I think just like how we know the principles of communication intuitively, practicing great communication is another thing.
I’ve always been amazed at how hard really good communication truly is. One of the main reasons good communication is so hard is that everyone has a perception of the world that is different from our own. At the end of the day, communication is just trying to get others to better understand our own perception of the world. This, as you might imagine, is really hard to do1.
These large language models are not much different. They have some perception of the world. We don’t know exactly what that perception of the world is, but neither do we actually know what other human beings’ perception of the world really is. The closer we get to other people, the better an understanding of their perception of the world we get, but we still are far from perfect understanding. Just ask any married couple, siblings, child and parent relationship, etc.
As we use these models more and more, perhaps we’ll get a better understanding of the way they perceive the world, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. We will likely be able to share context with them more over time — like giving them access to our files, documents, pictures, entire device, etc — but I don’t think that will close the gap completely. Just like how sharing company documents, presentations, meetings, etc doesn’t give you a perfect understanding of your coworkers and how they think.
What does all this mean then? Of course it’s a bit hard to predict the future but what I would say is that it means having great communication skills probably gives you a leg up in the future. Being able to effectively communicate your objectives and providing clear context will go a long way in working with these models. No matter how good they get, you’ll still need to be able to give it some direction and a shared understanding. If you just make assumptions about what you think it understands or will do, you’ll end up with worse results.
Which leads me to the last interesting thing I’ll mention here: management skills might actually become more valuable in the future than individual contributor skills2. This might be repulsive to some, depending on how they view management, but hear me out for a bit. If you forget about bad management (aka the bad bosses you may have had over your career) and instead just think about what the role of management is actually supposed to do, you’ll come to realize that management is all communication at the end of the day.
The best managers give their teams clear objectives and then get out of their way and help give them everything they need to get their job done. But this isn’t a “set it and forget it” approach either. The work continues on, continuously, because things change over time. That’s why a manager’s calendar is so packed with meetings. It’s all communication! They need to be processing information and sharing information constantly. Then they can provide their team with the correct context that they need to get their jobs done or help communicate things to other teams in order to better serve their team.
I can’t help but think this is how we’re all going to be working with LLMs in the future. Instead of performing all the little tasks like content generation, coding, etc. we’re going to be managing a bunch of different intelligent agents to help us achieve our objectives. Therefore, knowing how to clearly communicate objectives and goals, providing important and timely context, and making decisions about whether or not to change directions is going to become extremely important skills to have in the future.
Communication is such a hard thing to do well, but when it is done well the payoffs can be huge.
In case you don’t get the reference for the title of this post:
This principle of everyone having their own perception of the world can explain many of the challenges that we face as a society. But there are also a ton of benefits that comes from so many different perspectives coming together. Like most things in life, there are tradeoffs.
There’s a lot of irony in this statement to me too. Arguably, all of these models have been built by individual contributors. I personally kind of hate the distinction between managers and individual contributors, because I think each does a little of both, just different weights, but for the purposes of communicating ;), it’s helpful to keep the distinction.