The question

I remember standing at a beach in the morning in mid 2022. It was in Banyuwangi, East Java. I was with a friend. At that time he was my co-worker. I remember asking him, “Where are we going to be this exact date next year?” We were not sure of the answer. At that time I wasn’t married yet. I was still engaged to my fiancee. My friend was, I think, looking for ways to get scholarships to go to school abroad. I was still thinking of working on something about sustainable investments in agriculture or aquaculture. Doing something around ESG stuff basically.

A year later I had an AI product going viral on Twitter. I never knew I could make money from the internet. It was surreal. A lot has changed for just a year. And I knew exactly why that happened. ChatGPT happened.

I remember exactly the first time I interacted with ChatGPT. It was late November 2022. I saw screenshots of people’s conversation with ChatGPT and on a Sunday afternoon I went to my go-to coffeeshop and spend the day just having conversations with ChatGPT. I remember mostly asking it questions about philosophy, like the Chinese Room thought experiment, existentialism, God, just basic stuff people discuss the first time they go to philosophy class. I remember being blown away by it. I didn’t expect some AI to be that excellent in conversing about philosophy. I was so excited by its ability even though I wasn’t really sure in what practical ways it could help my life.

A couple of months later I went on a business trip to Jakarta. At that time I was still working out of Banyuwangi. I had the opportunity to chat with my college friends. Some of them are journalists. It turns out that most journalists in Indonesia didn’t have the tools to transcribe their interviews. My friend was still relying on interns to do the menial task. I went back to the hotel and searched for a possible solution. Whisper was just released a couple months back. I read the documentation and follow the tutorial for running it in google colab. I tried and it worked perfectly. I thought to myself, I stumbled upon a gold mine.

After that moment, I taught myself how to code by asking a lot of questions to ChatGPT. It was still GPT 3.5 so the coding ability is not that good. But it helped me launch a very simple prototype. It was a Flask project with a spaghetti Python code calling the OpenAI API for the Whisper stuff in the backend and a simple HTML and JS in the frontend. No database, no nothing. I was thinking this was only a prototype for my journalist friends to get their feedback.

I sent the link to the project to my friends. No one really tried it. Yup. But I didn’t really think much of it. I posted the link on Twitter so some of my friend would check that out. Beyond my expectation, the tweet blew up. My phone was hot. It didn’t stop buzzing for an entire night.

That moment changed the trajectory of my life. I went on to grow the product and got it acquired the same year. I continued working with the company that acquired the product for a year and now I work for xAI, one of the biggest AI lab in the world only a couple of years later.

So, dear friend, where are we going to be this exact date next year? I’m still not sure. But what I know now is I want to still be working in AI. AI is going to be one of, if not the, most important thing this century. I don’t want to be just looking at it from the sideline. I want to contribute. I want to get the benefit from it. People languish that we’re born too soon or too early, I say we’re born just in time.