Dear friends,
Around the world, students are graduating. If you’re one of them, or if someone close to you is graduating, congratulations!!!
My family swapped pictures on WhatsApp recently and came across this one, which was taken when I graduated from Carnegie Mellon (I’m standing in the middle). I was privileged to have already worked on a few AI projects thanks to my mentors in college, including Michael Kearns, Andrew McCallum, Andrew Moore and Tom Mitchell. But now, looking back, I reflect on how clueless I was and how little I knew about AI, business, people, and the world in general.
To this day, I don’t feel particularly clued in. Every year or so, I look back and marvel at how clueless I was a year ago, and I’m pretty sure I’ll feel the same way a year from now. This helps me to act with humility and avoid expressing unwarranted certainty.
If you’re graduating:
- Congratulations on all you’ve learned!
- I hope that you’ll have the pleasure of learning so much in each coming year that you, too, will marvel at how little you used to know.
- I also hope you’ll treasure the people around you. Of the people in the picture, I still zoom regularly with my parents (left) and brother (right), but my two grandparents who attended my commencement ceremony are no longer with us.
If you’ve already graduated, I hope you’ll take joy in the success of those who are coming up behind you.
Love to you all and keep learning,
Andrew