LLMs: An Operator’s View

Many of you that read my articles are operators of some kind.

You may run one or many teams, or even a whole company. And, even if you are not a manager by definition, you may wield a great deal of influence over directions and decisions.

In the midst of the current LLM explosion, we as operators find ourselves amongst:

• A blistering pace of improvement in the capabilities of LLMs. New models and products are being released at a rate that is hard to keep up with.
• Immense noise and hype online making all sorts of claims, good and bad, about what the future holds.
• An expectation from our companies to go full-on with “AI”, which typically means LLMs, both in developer tooling and in customer-facing products. AI is the new data is the new cloud.
• Echoes in the industry that we are all now overstaffed as a result of productivity gains: that everyone should do more with less, and that AI is the answer to that.

Note: this article is not a technical overview of how to build products with LLMs. Instead, the intent is to touch upon what leadership should do from the perspective of the productivity of teams and organizations, and consequently how we should think about spending our