So, all of my GEN-AI usage related to tech is around technology that I understand well.
I know the terminology, the tech stack, the words that I need to use, the architecture
and those kinds of things.
In contrast, when I recently had to work with reinforcement learning, something that I'm
like completely unaware about because I'm not from machine learning background, I was
curious how I could involve GEN-AI to build something that I'm not at all familiar with.
So, it was an interesting experience and I think there's some nice insights that came
out from that experience.
Alright, so here's a kind of very basic script that I tried to create while learning reinforcement
learning.
This is to train a model to play Super Mario game.
So to build this on Google collab, I provided Gemini with a prompt that said write code
to build a model using Python reinforcement learning using stable baselines PPO to play
Mario game.
And it gave me a certain version of this kind of very small script.
I went ahead and kind of just tried to run the script and it threw certain errors right
away.
I pasted that to Gemini to kind of fix it.
I'm getting an error overflow error Python integer 1 0 2 so and so.
Is this caused by Python version gym versions compatibility?
Can you find out what version of Python and gym and stable baselines 3 will this work
with?
It got back to me with specific versions that I should install.
I went ahead and obviously installed those and I got a different error.
This time I got a module not found which I pasted to Gemini and asked it to kind of take
care of the error.
It then gave me certain other steps to fix.
I went ahead and applied these steps and I was still getting there and I said I still
get module not found.
What am I missing?
It gave me more things to try out.
I went ahead and tried each of these steps and I kind of continued to get the same error.
I kind of had hit a wall.
This was with Python 3.11 on Google Colab.
I checked the chat GPT which suggested me to try Python 3.8.
So I actually took this example local and tried it on cursor.
Even with chat GPT or clouds on it, I could not fix it.
I started to get a different error, but I had kind of hit a wall on a very simple example
where I wasn't able to get it to run despite having spent maybe somewhere between two to
three hours trying to get this to run.
That experience kind of brought an interesting insight which is that it is super critical
to be able to throw right prompts at gen AI to make the best use of it.
So someone who understands tech well is going to be massively more productive and make the
best use of gen AI versus someone who doesn't understand the tech, especially when they
kind of hit a wall and a lot of us who belong to the tech world often don't realize.
But when we use gen AI, we subconsciously provided the right hints of what aspects to
consider, where to put something, what technology to use or what not to use and kind of things
which may go amiss with someone who doesn't understand the tech.
And I think it as a result becomes super important to be aware of tech and understand tech well
to actually make the best use of gen AI.
And without that, we often kind of keep on hitting this sort of wall that I just experienced
and we may not be able to traverse or overtake it as fast as we would be if we were kind
of, you know, pretty tech aware.