Still Using Only Chat GPT? An Ex-Google Expert Teaches AI From Scratch | Masoom Minawala | Aishwarya

The Masoom Minawala Show

Aishwarya Srinivasan, an ex-Google expert, joins Masoom Minawala to discuss how to practically integrate AI into professional and personal w

Key takeaways

AI should be used to automate tasks that drain energy (like laundry or emails) so humans can focus on what brings them joy (like painting or creativity).
Prompt engineering is an iterative process of trial and error; the quality of output depends entirely on providing specific context, tone, and audience details.

Main topics

AI Literacy and Adoption
Prompt Engineering Techniques

Notable quotes

I'm an artist. I don't want AI to paint for me so I can do my laundry. I want it to do my laundry so I can paint.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a practical guide for viewing AI as a powerful c

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Is AI going to steal Speaker 2 (0:00) my Speaker 1 (0:01) job from me? Speaker 2 (0:01) Short answer, realistic answer, yes. You use AI for literally every part of this role. I spend more time with AI tools than I spend with my husband, for sure. Speaker 2 (0:12) Is Chachi Peeti the beginning and end of AI? Absolutely not. I feel that's the entry point. All of my thumbnails are not my pictures. They're all AI-generated pictures of me, but they look super realistic, thanks to Nano Banana. The other tool that I'm heavily, heavily invested in using is a combination of . Speaker 2 (0:32) I can't even remember the last 20 dishes by the time I've reached 25th dish. So I just uploaded that to ChatGPT and I was like, help me mix and match the dishes so it doesn't feel too South Indian. The more detailed you are, the more structured you are, that's the best thing that you can do with prompting. What is something that gives you joy? Don't automate that. What are the things which takes away the energy from you? Go and automate that. I'm an artist. I don't want AI to paint for me so I can do my laundry. I want it to do my laundry so I can paint. The market is going to open up. Speaker 1 (1:10) AI is everywhere right now in our work, our careers and the choices we're being asked to make every day. Now this episode is a clear practical introduction to AI and how it shows up in real life. We talk about the tools people are actually using, how different professionals can apply AI in their own work and how to begin learning it in a way that feels manageable and relevant. My guest today brings deep credibility to this conversation. She's worked at Microsoft and Google and now builds and teaches in the AI education space, helping people understand and use AI with confidence. This conversation is designed to give you clarity, direction and a strong starting point. If you've been curious about AI and wanted a grounded way to engage with it, this episode is for you. Speaker 1 (1:59) Can you talk Speaker 2 (1:59) to me about everything that you do? So I have my full-time job. So I work at an AI startup. I'm leading an AI developer relations team. So that's like very technical part of my life. But outside of that, I'm running courses. I'm helping people upskill in different domains. So I do very technical workshop, which is for software engineers and data scientists. Then I do workshops for non-technical people. So if you're a marketer, if you've been doing traditional ads and marketing, how can you use AI to do it better? whether it's like ad campaign manager, using AI tools to help you build different versions of an ad and see which works better. And even as simple as like doing a human analysis, right? Like at the end of the day, these ads are catering to humans. So it depends if you like an ad or not. Absolutely. So all of like doing all of that analysis at a human level is possible and can be done at scale with all of these AI tools, which is incredible. So I do a lot of training for non-technical professionals and I create content on LinkedIn, which is again catering to more technical professionals. And then I teach people about AI on my Instagram channel. I do long form videos on my YouTube channel. I'm advising some startups in Bay Area. So yeah, that's pretty much what I do. Speaker 1 (3:16) Wow. Okay. And you use AI for literally every part of this role. Speaker 2 (3:22) I spend more time with AI tools than I spend with my husband for sure. Speaker 1 (3:26) How did you find yourself Speaker 2 (3:27) in the world of Speaker 1 (3:28) technology? Speaker 2 (3:30) So I would say I was always curious about technology. I did not have a lot of access to computers and stuff outside of what I had in my school. And luckily, I found this interest when I would visit my mom's office. She used to work in a B school. She was an assistant to professors and she would work very closely with MBA students and MBA professors. So for me, after school, I would just go hang out with her in her office. So I had access to computers there. I had access to what she was doing. And my initial hunch into what I liked in the data science machine learning AI space was because of pure analytics because she was working mostly on data analytics. This is way before AI became cool or even like you know came out of the research lab. So that was my initial exposure to data analysis and computers. I somewhere thought that I fell in love with coding. programming and like seeing what you can do with the technology. And then it was pretty much a traditional trajectory. I went to do my undergrad in computer science, learned more about machine learning and AI. This is again back in 2013. So I feel like the biggest trajectory came in in 2022 after ChatGPT was launched. Before then, AI was considered as something which is too technical or like you know sitting in research labs or Speaker 1 (4:54) sitting in companies exactly like or you think of literally robots when you only think about Speaker 2 (4:59) robots people like my mom would not know what AI means yeah back then yeah and I'm very glad that what happened when it happened with ChatGPT because every single person on this planet sort of opened their eyes and it was that internet moment, right? That now it's not just for tech professionals, it's not just for businesses, but it can really improve each and every of our lives. So what is AI? So in the simplest way I would explain this is it's just a tool. The way that we see calculators are, it lets you do something faster, easier. more controlled and in an automated manner. I would say AI is just a smarter automation. It's a smarter machine, which does things beyond what you made it for. Speaker 1 (5:48) So a Speaker 2 (5:49) simple example is if you're building a calculator, you do two plus two, it's going to respond with four. But what AI does is you can actually give it a goal. You can say that I want you to do this. and then it will figure out a way to do that. You're not instructing it what to do or how to do it, but you're just telling you what you want from it and it figures out a way intelligently. Give us an example. So, for example, writing assistant, right? You tell it that, hey, write an email for me. That used to not exist before 2022. It was not something which was an available tool for people. Now, the way the AI models are built, how is it able to write an email for you? Because we have provided this computer with all of the text knowledge which is available on the internet. Speaker 1 (6:41) So Speaker 2 (6:42) every single email template that has ever existed on the internet, every single book, every single podcast, every single song, every single text information which has been available on the internet has been fed into this model and it learns what writing means. So at the end of the day, what it does is it has read a lot. Now you come and ask it to do something for you. It tries to understand, oh, this person is asking me to write an email. So I'm going to jog my memory and figure out what a good email looks like. And I'm going to write it based on what information this user has provided for me. So that's an intelligent system because you're not telling it how to do it. You're telling it what to do and it figures out how to do it. Yes, absolutely. You're right. Speaker 1 (7:27) I know you love our content. I don't doubt it one bit. But I'd love if you can prove it to me by hitting the subscribe button. It's just three inches away from your thumb. Hit Speaker 2 (7:37) it and let's build the largest women content community in India. So Speaker 1 (7:41) what are the AI skills that you think professionals, but also not necessarily professionals, everyone needs to know today? And really, how many are there, right? Because I think AI has kind of become Speaker 1 (7:57) so omnipresent in our lives today. But there's, we, I think we know it to the extent of chat GPT. I think the second most common tool is the Gemini. And I think that's kind of where we go up until when we're looking at the masses and their kind of awareness. So, firstly, let's talk about AI skills and AI tools. Two different things, right? Yeah, Speaker 2 (8:19) two different things. So let's kick off with AI skills. Okay. So the best example that I like to talk about when we're talking about how do I learn AI, what do I learn about AI is comparing it with internet. Speaker 1 (8:31) Okay. Speaker 2 (8:33) I remember my father had actually gone for one internet class which was using computer, browsing the web and he gave up. He was like, this is not my piece of cake. He's still like, till the time he was alive, he used to use one of those Nokia phones which just had buttons with like no touchpad and nothing. And this late game. Exactly. That's how he, for him, like that's what technology was. But in today's world, if you tell somebody, to learn to use internet, it just sounds stupid, right? Like who doesn't know how to use internet? Everybody knows how to use internet. And internet is not something that only professionals use or only like people who are very smart use. Even a vegetable vendor is using internet in some form or the other. And I highly encourage people to think about using AI the same way you think about using internet. And the reason I am advocating for it for AI literacy especially is because the speed at which internet was developed and the speed at which it was adopted was very slow. If you compare it with AI, it's happening so fast and it's all the AI companies which are in a race to get ahead and the development is just incredibly fast that even as an AI professional, it is hard to keep up. I can only imagine what it would feel like a general public. Yes. So it is important that you open up your mind. And this is a very practical tip that I even tell my mom to do, which is every single time, the simplest of tasks that you do every day, think about how an AI can help you. Like just write it on a notepad and put it on your fridge that every single day I have to do anything, I'm going to first think how an AI can help me. For example, my mom wanted to share New Year's card to people and she was like, I want it to be like this. I want it to have a little Ganpati on it. I want it to say this and I was like go use ChatGPT to do it. Tell it exactly what you want in the card and it will produce for you. She did that. She was like, I don't know what to cook today. Like I have a little bit of ragi flour. I have a little bit of these veggies. I'm confused what to cook. Go use an AI tool. Ask an AI that here are the ingredients that I have. What can I do with it? So the de facto, the default way that you think about retrieving information or doing basic tasks, which are manual and time consuming, turn off your brain to use internet the regular way that we would do it and start thinking about AI tool to do the same thing. Speaker 1 (11:02) But don't you think turning off the brain is counterproductive to us as humans? Speaker 2 (11:08) When I say turn off the brain, it's not turning off the brain from thinking capacity. At the end of the day, when you would use internet, it was a means to retrieve information. Speaker 1 (11:19) Yes. If Speaker 2 (11:20) I go 100 years ago, newspapers was a way to retrieve information. Books were a way to retrieve information. Then internet came, internet became a way to retrieve faster information. Now with AI tool, it's one level faster than internet to retrieve the same kind of information that you are doing. So it's not that we are outsourcing our thinking. We are outsourcing searching. Speaker 1 (11:43) That's the way I think about it. You know what happens to the creative self? Right? When we rely on AI. So it's almost like I have the ragi flour, I have the veggies. and I don't know what to do with it and what to make with it. If AI doesn't exist or you don't turn to AI, you're going to think about it, right? So you're going to think about it and you're going to like, okay, should I be creative with it? Should I be innovative with it? Should I invent something? Which is like a lot of invention and innovation happens in the kitchen. Yeah. And it's a great creative outlet. Or you could also be like, let me call my mom or let me call my friend and ask her what to make. Yeah. And it also cuts down that human interaction. And how do you feel about that? What you're mentioning is actually Speaker 2 (12:29) very accurate. And it is in a lot of the researches which talks about like human mind and the way that we are culturally interacting with each other. It has spoken about this, that using AI tools or like being heavily reliant, even like on social media platforms has affected our EQ. Speaker 1 (12:49) And Speaker 2 (12:50) what you're mentioning is exactly in one of the reports that came out which said that our attention span and our creative thinking has gotten down because of using AI tools. I think it is very much a conscious choice that you have to make on what do you want to use your mind for and when do you want to Speaker 1 (13:12) outsource it to some extent. Speaker 2 (13:15) The way I would think about it is in a simpler example, right? Like in today's world, if you want to really say stitch something for yourself, you can go to a tailor, you can go to a designer who will build that for you. But early in the days, people would stitch sweaters and socks for themselves. That was a craft. Some people still continue to do it because they find joy in it. Today's day we have the technology to automate that. The Speaker 1 (13:47) same way there are a lot of Speaker 2 (13:49) things which humans will continue to do it because they find joy in it. Whether it is reading a book, whether it is thinking about what I want to bake today. That's going to be a very personal and conscious decision where you say that, hey, I'm not going to use technology for it. I'm going to do this by myself. Whether it's writing something, whether it's writing a story, whether it's cooking something, whether it's... painting something, you have access to the tools, but you make a conscious decision to do it other way. So it is going to be something that people have to decide for themselves. One of the artists had shared this, which I thought was very funny.