AI special issue

Hello friends,

We have part 2 of our series on finding career happiness coming up. But we are going to do something a little bit different this week and switch up formats. With all the news related to AI this week, we are going to deep dive that focuses on great coverage and resources to help understand what is going in in AI at this moment. I’m no AI expert, but I’ve been reading up on it a lot, and wanted to share with you some of the resources that I’ve found helpful along the way.

I have to say, for the past few years I’ve had a reasonably high degree of skepticism on the topic of AI as the phrase became diluted (as so many things often do) by marketing BS in our industry. No doubt the technology is real and had many security use cases, but it was hard to tell exactly what the implications would be. It seemed for a while that all you had to do was take an old concept, add some machine learning on the back end, get a .ai domain and all of the sudden you had a shiny new brilliant thing worthy of a 30x revenue valuation.

But I have to say that when I saw generative AI for the first time, specifically Dall-E, I became a convert. I haven’t had that sense of technological wonder since the first time I heard a compact disk (yes, I’m aging myself), or the first time I played around with an iPhone. This all is, indeed, a big damn deal. It will change so much of our lives.

Having lived through many tech hype cycles, I can make some comparisons. There are tech innovations that generate hype and flame out (see: Dean Kamen and Segway). There are tech innovations that start quiet and then explode into relevancy (short video social media ala TikTok). There are innovations that go through a huge hype cycle, overpromise and underdeliver, then go through a much more significant wave of innovation and use case development. This was the story of the internet between 1996-2001, then from 2006 to today. It is the story of Palm Pilots and personal assistants leading to mobile phones. This is also, I think, the AI cycle we are in today. The first wave was buzz and flash and overpromise/ underdeliver. The second wave is an explosion of use cases.

Before we dive in, I want to make a friendly reminder, our market compensation survey is live. If you work as a cybersecurity practitioner, please fill it out (it’s anonymous!). At the end, you will be provided access to a link to register to receive ongoing compensation insights relative to your chosen cybersecurity line of work.

Without further adieu, Here’s our rundown of the AI world as we sit here today. Please send me other things you’ve read and found interesting on the topic and I’ll make sure to include them in future newsletters.

Cheers,

Brad

The chat + search war begins

🔥Firsthand perspective on the release of the new Bing search powered by AI. Reporter was blown away (WSJ)

➕OpenAI has released Chat GPT+, which promises priority access (OpenAI)

🔍Google response to the big Microsoft announcement (Google)

🤦Also, Google, you completely biffed the landing. Like, $120B worth (Telegraph)

💡Chinese search companies are responding to Chat GPT (CNBC)

👂Good podcast from the Economist exploring the chat + search wars (The Economist)

👂Podcast interviewing the Microsoft and OpenAI team behind the new search capabilities (NYT)

Interviewing the bots

So, I’m detecting a new trend. As AI becomes something close to sentient, the temptation is to talk to it. There have been a rash of AI interviews. Here are a couple interesting ones:

🤖 Cyberwire recently did a good podcast on the implications of Chat GPT for security, and even interviewed the bot (Cyberwire)

🤖The Economist (Babbage) interviewed a humanoid robot that combines large language model-driven speech with lifelike physical movements (The Economist)

🤖ChatGPT explains ChatGPT (this feels a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole) (LevelUp Coding)

AI and security

🧑‍💻Reflections on the impact of AI for the cyber skills gap (hint, it ain’t going to solve it) (Threat Post)

🕸️Rundown of current AI/ML use cases in cyber (Mark Lynd)

Interesting AI use cases

🧑‍💻AI is changing the way programmers work already. Github Copilot uses AI to autocomplete, just like Gmail or Outlook (Github)

🎵Google has an AI music generator, but is keeping it under wraps for now (Tech Crunch)

🧠 The technology is here that can turn your thoughts into text (Singularity Hub)

🖊️AI generated interview notes (Metaview)

Best newsletters to stay up to date on AI

📰 The Batch

📰AI Weekly 

📰AI Disruption 

📰Big Brain Daily

Jobs at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity

💼OpenAI. Security engineer, Detection & Response (San Francisco)

💼OpenAI. Security engineering manager, Product & Platform (San Francisco)

💼Kyla. CISO (Remote)

💼Data Robot. Senior Backend Engineer, Security, Compliance and Config (Remote, Ireland)

💼Google. Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Cloud Security and Privacy (Remote)

💼Celonis. Senior Application Security Engineer (New York)

Crux is building the talent platform for cybersecurity. Check us out.

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