Mother's Day Gift Recommendations

I was particularly proud of my Mother’s Day gift for 2023. After the release of ChatGPT in late November 2022, I was running around like an evangelist trying to convince everyone and their mother that they needed to learn the latest AI tools.

I was a strong believer that this AI thing was here to stay, and (at the time) I believed that those who learned how to use it would have a significant advantage. A lot of people complained that they didn’t know what to use it for. This was my gotcha moment. Learning to know when to use it was exactly the skill that would give you the advantage over your peers. I told people “just buy it”, and the burden of having your credit card drawn every month will force you to think about use cases. It is all a bit silly looking back at it now.

So for Mother’s Day 2023, my mom obviously got a ChatGPT subscription. For her, the drive to come up with use cases was even stronger than to justify a monthly bill - finding use cases was a way to express gratitude to her son. So she did. It turns out that the advantages were stronger than just learning to know when to use it. She became the AI spokesperson at work, and made the initiative to implement an AI chatbot in their product.

My dad never bothered to learn to use the AI tools. Examining his usage patterns (when he occasionally uses it) and comparing them with mom’s usage patterns, highlights what this “skill” actually is.

• Know when to use it: Finding the use cases when ChatGPT saves significant time.
• Know how to use it: Prompting the AI in clever ways to get better answers (aka, prompt engineering)
• Know when to trust it: Spotting hallucination in the AI output.

Now, two years later, it has become mainstream to advocate for learning AI tools, it is the new “everyone should learn how to code”. But two years is a lifetime in AI-land, and I don’t think this is great advice anymore. AI has become much better in these two years, and in one more year, AI will be so good that these skills will be useless.

• Know when to use it: As models get smarter, the pool of use cases will grow. You will basically use it all the time, and there is no skill to realizing that.
• Know how to use it: Model will be smart enough on its own to figure out what you want. We already see this with the new reasoning models (like o1). The added value of good prompting has decreased significantly.
• Know when to trust it: Just trust it all the time. The problem of hallucinations has already decreased a lot and it is a dying phenomenon.

So if this is not great advice any more, what is the new advice to stay ahead? And most importantly, can this advice be made into a gift? After all, this post is about gift recommendations for Mother’s Day 2025.

“I have now taken two university credits and a couple of e-learning courses, and I still don’t understand AI” exclaimed my mom in frustration the other day. I laughed through the tears. Fueled by the desire to follow along when me and my sister discuss AI, she is now taking the extra step beyond just learning the tools to learn the basic theory of AI. Is this what everyone should do now?

The world will very soon be completely run by AI systems that are smarter than humans in almost every way. When exactly? Expert “future forecasters” predicts this to happen in 2031. The people building the AI expect it to be much sooner. For example, Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei predicts 2026/2027. Note that the former group is not specifically experts in AI, and the latter has invested interest. But even the biggest skeptics think that is less than decades.

Regardless when it happens, the fact that AI will be such a big part of our lives surely means it is good to learn the basic theory? Should my Mother’s Day gift be another e-learning course? I am not so sure. It won’t hurt, but I am not sure it will give a big advantage. As a parallel, you don’t need to understand neuroscience to think, and you don’t need to understand quantum physics to use a computer.

If you are ready to commit all your waking hours to mastering AI, you might still have time to make a dent in the universe (before AI is better at humans at all possible tasks). But this is not what we are talking about here. The perfect Mother’s Day gift is one where just a little extra effort gives an outsized advantage. Evident from my mom’s frustration, learning AI requires more effort than this.

One place where I think you could have an outsized impact is to help the adoption of AI. Are you allowed to use ChatGPT at work today? If not, your company is losing to the competitor that uses ChatGPT. But to be honest, not by much. But this loss will be 1000x worse very soon.

So how can one help adoption of AI? I am not an expert here, but I suspect it would involve learning the regulatory landscape around user data and IP. Start contacting the right people already. But to be honest, this is probably too much work for my mom, and I expect it might be for your mom too. I therefore don’t recommend text books in corporate policy and data regulation for Mother’s Day 2025.

I mentioned earlier in passing that we will soon have AI systems that are smarter than humans in almost every way. This is beyond insane. I suspect that understanding the shift that is coming will be good for one’s mental health. To this end, I recommend reading Situational Awareness by Leopold Aschenbrenner. However, it is free, so it would make a very lame Mother’s Day gift.

What might be even better for one’s mental health is to prepare for what to do when job losses occur. It will inevitably lead to many lost jobs. Perhaps the gift should be something that can inspire the start of a new hobby. However, I don’t think my mom is at risk. She has already started to prepare for her retirement. She has already stopped defining herself by her work role. She has already achieved what she wanted from her career. The person at risk here is me. Therefore, my Mother’s Day 2025 gift will be hiking gear that matches what I just got for myself.

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