Generative AI

A recent episode of Latent Space with Joon Sung Park, co-founder of Simile AI, caused a strange flashback to my student days in industrial engineering. Long before anyone talked about generative AI, we learned to use a piece of software called Arena to build probabilistic simulations of airports, supermarkets, factories, and other complex systems. The basic idea was simple and surprisingly powerful. Instead of changing the real system, you built a simplified version of it on a computer. Customers arrived according to some probability distribution. A cashier took a variable amount of time to serve them. Queues formed, resources became occupied and available again. You could add another checkout lane, change the staffing level, or rearrange a production line, run the simulation thousands of times, and see what happened before spending money in the real world. ...

When an artificial intelligence system gives us a wrong answer, almost everyone reaches for the same explanation, which is that the system never learned the thing we asked about. The information was missing from its training, and so the remedy is to supply more of it, whether that means more data, a larger model, or another round of training on our own internal documents. This explanation has become so common that most organizations no longer treat it as an assumption, and they build their budgets and their improvement plans around it. ...

There is a version of Product Management work that AI can probably do. It can certainly summarize interviews, cluster feedback, draft PRDs and epics, answer questions about product data, and produce mockups. Do enough of that well enough, and the role starts to look like an information processing layer with some communication on top. But that is not what Product Management is all about. The center of the role was never the paperwork. It was always judgment: deciding what problem matters, interpreting incomplete and conflicting signals, making tradeoffs under uncertainty and pressure, defining success, and taking responsibility for the call. ...