Learn Generative AI From Scratch In 2024🤖 | AI Engineer Roadmap for Beginners

so as an 18-year-old if you know someone's looking to hire you they'll probably want you now to know these new skills versus like be in the old set of skills when I was at Apple we've done that like we've hired actually a lot of people right out of conferences so you'll see students with college projects that they're like great toy projects but you hire them and then day one they're like oh like this is too complex for me 18-year-old wants to learn computer science and wants to get into the details of how do you actually

train a model I would rather move to Bangalore than move to any other place in the US don't be like I'm dependent on somebody to teach me or spoon feed me everybody's on the equal playing Ground an 18-year-old is equally as capable as a 30y old as a 50-year old coming right out of college with zero experience I would say a base salary of something around maybe frav Punit thank you for taking out the time today for all of you who are watching we're going to talk about generative Ai and the opportunities there are in

this whole field how can you get started what skills are important and why both of these Lely gentlemen moved from India to SF and what is the life here like so that you got a new perspective in your life and you can make a better decision about your career first of all I would love to get a quick intro about both of you I'll starting from pranav you are an alumni from my college but the next I will leave to you yeah yeah thanks aan for having me so yeah I was at bits Pani back

in 2007-11 computer science program and was working at a company called Citrix in Bangalore for a year and after that came internally via the company to to the US for some time and started working here like the work culture and and sort of interacting with people and and the kind of problems we were solving back then in 2011 when cloud computing was becoming a big thing and then I liked it so much that I decided to quit the company and come back again and went to CMU in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania on the student visa finished my

masters and came back to the Bara again in 2014 is time frame and started working at Apple uh back in like January 2015 time frame and worked there for 5 years quit the company and now I've been at meta for another 5 years and uh sort of spearheading efforts in the arvr space for meta reality labs and and seeing this whole like Tech Revolution going towards this AI uh boom and being a part of that and working on like Niche algorithms and and Frameworks and platforms to really bring AI to a a consumer I think

it's just been an amazing opportunity something which I feel um is is is once in a lifetime kind of like opportunity to be a part of so I mean that's been my journey and excited to be sort of like playing that uh role of taking this revolution forward and yeah amazing and this is also fun fact the fourth video that we recording on on my channel yeah I I remember starting off with the First Recording back in 2020 so I glad that we've both finally in person meeting in person yeah exactly yeah amazing Punit so

I'm Punit kohi I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Career flow. it's a startup and I'll talk more about that but my journey has been basically uh you know standard where I did a bachelor's degree in computer science or it specifically um during my bachelor's this was in India I I went to a college called College of Engineering Pune and there I actually started a games and app development company with some of my batchmates so that was like my first uh real experience even though I was still in college um post that you

know the company went well we were actually one of the first uh developers on the Blackberry 10 platform and we were one of the top developers there um so that gave me a lot of exposure at a you know young age much like yourself right now um but through that I got you know a lot of exposure industry insights uh I decided that I wanted to work at bigger companies to see you know the other side of the table uh so I worked at a company in India for a year Hyderabad it's called the isaw

they had a spin-off called R ccim then decided to do a master's degree at Texas A&M University after that I uh interned at Amazon got an offer at a startup which was really cool because it was at the intersection of the three things that I really cared about gaming um consumer so something really cool and basically uh computer vision and machine learning so this startup did 3D glasses 3 3D displays I worked there for about uh two and a halfish years and then I got an offer from Apple so I joined Apple to join the

Vision Pro Group this was back in 2020 during covid worked there for about two years on hand tracking uh so had a great experience contributing to that project and then I left to start my own company career flow. which is an AI co-pilot for job Seekers and careers and so today we have you know about half a million users who use our product uh to improve their careers in job search that's amazing so you went from Amazon Apple startup and you went from Apple meta and then I'm still still trying to figure out my entrepreneurship

uh Journey but at the same time like I'm I'm like really happy to be a part of like initiatives which meta has been driving overall in the AI space yeah tell me a bit about what are these is trying to do in the space of generative AI right meta has made everything open source Apple has just introduced Apple intelligence Amazon what is Amazon doing I don't know if they're doing anything in the in the in the b2c space they they have like they've been coming up with initiatives in the AI space but they also have

a platform called AWS Bedrock where you can actually use these thirdparty models like Claude and mystel and all that and then build AI Agents from scratch for like small businesses and they are enabling users to come and just deploy agents as if like you were editing image on a phot shop so it's going to be as simple as like creating agents and and having those be like present on your like business's website and they can do the stuff for you like like basically think of it as not just like a conversational bot but actually taking

actions and making it super easy for anyone who visits the website to take like or to navigate through certain certain steps very cool and Google is there with Gemini and the product we don't have anyone from Google TR but we will try to so you tell tell me a bit about this thing what are these companies trying to achieve and what role are they playing in this whole genetic race after open I up CH GPT yeah you want to take a stab or I mean sure I can give you like a more you know pragmatic

answer to this is think about this right there's a new technology it's super convenient and easy for anyone to go and use this technology right whether you are a Layman or you're like a hot shot developer that works at one of these companies literally everyone across the world was taken by storm when Chad GPD blew up right and essentially now everybody who's working in these companies at all levels is thinking okay well how can we leverage this technology so it's not I mean yes there's a top down of like you know maybe Mark Zuckerberg saying

like we need to you know do better in AI but there's also this bottom up approach where everybody in every team is like oh I'm working on this specific product and this specific group what can we do to enhance our offering to our customers using this new technology and so if you see offerings by Google right almost every one of Google's products and services is um they've tried to figure out how can we leverage AI so whether that's in uh Google Documents whether that's in the search experience you know and there's thousands of those Microsoft

is doing something similar and I'm sure everyone's thinking of it the same way is like how do we improve my team's you know kpis my team's products how do I make my customers more happier uh but then if you you know take one level away and you're going to like a Google IO event and then there's like oh my God Google's working on thousand different AI products but that's actually what's happening at at the you know inside these companies MH mhm yeah I mean totally agreed with pun here every company is strategically approaching this space

and trying to figure out what's the product road map for AI how it fits into the landscape of different product offerings like I can talk about meta you probably have seen meta AI being leveraged in WhatsApp and Instagram I just saw that you can you can like now generate stickers like you can generate like even audio and videos in the future you saw open AI announcements with Sora and corresponding like competitive products and coming up in that space so I think digital marketing U is going to change I think you probably would not need creators

to go create all this content manually but leverage these tools so having that sort of you know uh awareness of what sort of tools are available in the market and how do you actually leverage that to your skill set and enhance your skill set as per what's the state-of-the-art Technologies in that space I think it's going to be an evolving sort of atmosphere in this AI space and it's yet to be seen how that pans out again I mean I think the revenue generation part of that is is yet to be seen I think lot

of like debates around from from investors like hey we like you know in that AI Revolution there's also I mean some people call it AI hype I mean for a lack of a a better sentiment around it but I think the actual returns of how AI delivers those Returns on investment in terms of whether it's product experience people spending more money on on Services is yet to be seen I think that's that's a a question mark at this point for people who don't know about met I think it's a feature in Instagram chat where you

can ask to generate pictures and other things plus now on WhatsApp I just saw this yesterday so you can actually have that in a group in a chat and you can just ask it to create a picture or write anything text message a text message or you could also ask for piano resel for example I searched that and I got a bunch of reels and I could click on that it would direct me to Instagram and then I could I could watch that so that's the new feature but why do they have it there what

is the whole whole goal that they have I think the the intuition there is to have consumers leverage these capabilities and services from Day Zero and as they're getting more sort of familar with what that AI landscape means for a consumer then they can release like more products which are like more AI powered so that there is a natural sort of like you can say a a tangent from where you are today to where you want to be in the future which is like let's say fully AI powered rather than just AI playing a a

lending hand and making your experience better so and it starts with like just baking all of that technology into the products which consumers already know of like met for example WhatsApp Instagram like people spend so much time on these products every single day so what's better than having them actually use AI Services as part of these platforms itself and then maybe build something else in the future yeah yeah so now you can see more creative pictures from your uncles and aunties sending you good morning messages using met really cool um whether it is revenue generating

or not is a different topic but one thing is for sure that the talent gets to win all the time right I think you would all agree with that that even though whatever these companies are building the talent developers designers marketers are the one who get to win at the most places absolutely so for a 18-year-old who's watching this video right now and wants to enter this field wanted to understand number one what does the skill set look like for them what do they need to learn and what has been the change before CH GPT

came and after CH GPT came so what were the changes and how can they get started in this in this whole field Punit start with you sure so I think you know um post chat GPD a lot has changed in in like especially the entry level market right uh and I'm saying this from multiple perspectives one is just obviously looking around second is I'm actually hiring a bunch of people and then third is our company deals with you know career and talent um at the entry level the biggest challenge for people has been like I

I've learned how to use certain tools but I may not be an expert at them because I didn't get the opportunity to work on a real world project right and this is across development so you'll see students with college projects that they're like great toy projects but you hire them and then day one they're like oh like this is too complex for me right same thing with marketing like you know I can do a small prototype like Market a page but then if I have to handle a company's brand page that's very different um so

what these tools or what chat GPT and other tools have enabled is you can go from like that Junior engineer to a better version of that very easily right if you're willing to learn how to leverage the technology that's one way and that's across Industries doesn't matter which role you're in the second way actually which is more powerful is that every couple of years the tool chain evolves for whatever role you're in so if I'm a marketer you know a couple years ago I might have been using some tools and now I'm using different tools

so embedding uh AI into your workflows even as a junior or you know young person to enhance your own capabilities actually makes you you know move much faster so for example you know video editing is a great one where there's a lot of AI tools and technologies that you can leverage to like drastically reduce the time it takes to edit a video so as an 18-year-old if you know someone's looking to hire you they'll probably want you now to know these new skills versus like be in the old set of skills so that's something to

think about kind of as a new graduate coming into the workforce yeah I think pit made a great point there what I also think is that there are two facets to it one is that if you are in the Realms of being a a computer science guy let's say 18-year-old wants to learn computer science and wants to get into the details of how do you actually train a model like that a different skill set Al together so there's this applied ml or applied AI versus being somebody who actually understands what's the backbone of how this

model is built so somebody wants to go actually build their own version of model and train it based on their own data and all that that's I think a little bit different skill set versus eming the skill sets likey how do I use this tool to let's say edit a video or generate a certain text or train it on a specific version of data which is very like let's say bepoke to your needs so again I mean you know each skill set has it own benefits totally depends on the kind of use cases you may

have if you have if you're a small business you want to sell your website or make the experience for users easy you may want to apply those skills onto your website and then have a bot or an agent which can actually react to certain uh prompts or inputs versus like you want to go build something from scratch and and like have compute resources that's a very different skill set I'm sure there's audiences out there who want to actually do that too so how do you use like uh you know llama 3.1 or like you know

all these other models like gp4 or GPT five and understand the model of the backbone like how that has been built I think that's even more deeper into computer science so so that's why I say it's a double fa it sort of technology and each one to his own depends on the skill set they want to develop how can someone learn it less than the resources but like how to learn what there is out there because a lot of people have a lot of pre preconceived notions how can they like reset that and then start

from scratch I think being aware of like what's just happening in the technology landscape like following the U maybe uh very more techsavvy channels there are content creators out there who just talk about like AI like following them getting like aware of what's happening in the in the technology landscape most of the stuff comes from the Silicon Valley as if if if I am not uh wrong here like all of the Innovation happens there so following what each of these companies are doing attending conferences Google iio you were part of that and then like hearing

those announcements and trying like you know on the website like what's actually available for you to use as a developer I think those are like good starting points but I'm sure like people would be developing like courses on course era or udes and things like that where they can go and like actually build a full-fledged skill set on prompt engineering for that matter there are already like courses out there on prompt engineering like how do you frame or structure a better prompt which is going to give you better results I think people are thinking in

terms of not just leveraging like one AI model to give you the response but having an ensemble of models which can give you the best possible output for the kind of proms you have so things are like advancing and there are like lot of courses out there to like really uh enhance your prompt engineering skill set for that matter so yeah maybe P has yeah I mean uh it's interesting on the courses cuz you know I think being from Tech being from the Silicon Valley uh you know I saw chat GPT the first time in

fact I was using gpt3 that's before Chad GPT and so it was always about you know what are the right strategies to prompt this model it's kind of like it's a new new world for everyone so it's like oh if you know do this one thing if you use hashtags to separate two parts of the prompt it understands better so there was all the things very early on U but now I think you know over the last like one and a halfish years since that has uh you know models have evolved things evolved in fact

nowadays like you don't even need to like think about what your prompt is you know the models are getting better and better just understanding plain text yeah that's why my question was like is prompt enging even important as like a skill set to have because it might just become like HTML like a markup markup language yeah yeah I I think the goal is to get towards maybe the natural Lang anguage to be the The Prompt like plain English whatever your native language is whether it's English Hindi whatever language you should your your model should be

able to process that convert it into whatever model whatever language the model understand let's say it's some tokens and then process the tokens and respond back to you in your natural language so there's like some conversion or transformation happening in real time yeah I mean prompt engineering is is not as important that as it was like a year ago and I think that will will start to see less and less of like prompt engineering because the models are just smarter enough smarter that being said you know um especially for the kind of 40 plus age

group people that you know not necessarily putting a age number on it but more like who are senior and not so Savvy with technology uh I've actually seen some of these courses have been really helpful for them because it's a structured way of learning uh you know what are these tools what do they do what are the options what are the capabilities because uh you know I can give you a text box and you can put whatever you want in it and you'll get an output but uh I I believe some courses that you know

even some of our employees have taken on their own time have helped them unlock ideas of like oh I can use this technology for these things as well so now they're thinking more around like oh yeah this is a great use case yeah yeah yeah and I mean just to add something to that for example not just prompts but you know we talking about different modalities of prompts here like it's just not text it could be video audio whatever like you know different kind of modalities and and models are going to support that they're already

supporting with like different models coming out to support specifically like video Transformations audio Transformations and ultimately we want to ship these models in a way which is more intuitive for the user like products which will enhance that like Punit mentioned about you know elderly people not being able to do some more techsavvy task maybe can we have a device which can run your you know super intelligent AI model on the device itself without having to incur a lot of latency but still be able to do all of those like tasks in real time supporting different

modalities I think probably that's the direction world is heading towards yeah yeah you know a good a good example of like knowing that the technology exists versus like being able to leverage it you know I think of blog writing as a great example like I think when these AI tools came out first thing was like you know we don't need blog writers we'll just use GPT to write the blogs uh so even today like you know blog writers they'll put the content in chat GPT they'll get a output as a Blog the challenge is you

know it's very easy now for most people to say like oh yeah this is AI generated because you know you didn't give it enough information to uh tell it what you specifically make it sound human or you sound human you know brand voice Etc right so now there's like some specialized tools which will you'll be like this is my brand voice here there are I I see these text people TR like enhance all these words I mean there was a big thing on the word delve Del if anyone used Del they probably got it from

like Char or some unless you're from Africa apparently they use that commonly but the point is so now like we have blog writers and so I've said hey you can use AI tools it's obviously helping you but like if I read this blog and I can figure out that you didn't put any of your own inputs like that's not going to work so one thing you know we've recently started suggesting is like look the point is we want our blogs to be consistent over time and we want them to sound the same right have the

same brand voice so instead of using chat GPT we use perplexity Pro and we say say Hey listen we're writing a Blog for this company search our existing blogs keep the voice consistent you know these are the type of things we need and it will not only write you the blog it will read your existing blogs kind of keep the voice the same so for the same use case you can use two different AI tools but knowing the fact that I could use it differently actually gives me a huge benefit uh versus someone that didn't

even know that oh very cool yeah that's that's a that's a great Point yeah it also gives you references what other tools are like you you would advise people to use we had perplexity I also interviewed the founder of perplexity we had chat GPT which people are already using is there utility in using any other tool that you both have like tried out go use meta AI what do you use it for the most like anything text Generation video generation company logo generation brand marketing and just does everything it's just another like you know compated

to what all these other players in the market so it has all the capabilities now it is backed by llama 3.1 the 4 5B parameter model so and it has proven it to be better than even the GPD 40 if you go by the current benchmarks so I'm sure that's going to keep evolving as new models are trained and we probably would have a trillion parameter model one day what do you think Mark zurg's goal is with this with meta AI Lama 3.1 I mean I think the goal is that he wants to give the

power to creators consumers to be able to do what they want to do for making their lives better but at the same time I think he also wants to make this open source like you know U this technology should be available to Consumers at scale for free I mean that's what he's doing right now so and the goal being that a lot of these like mundane tasks anything which humans have difficulty in in in completing them they should be automated to a very high degree and how that is accomplished is yet to be seen in

different like areas you've seen like home automation Bots coming into play uh AI agents on the websites helping you with T so there's so many other like applications of of like AI to be like it's like pretty much everywhere so and how that sort of gets um you know evolved with time is is yet to be seen I'm sure there would be a lot of startups companies meets already looking into one so I'm sure like there would be other applications yeah let's not talk about the opportunities and how can people get access to these opportunities

U and the reason I'm talking about this is that I literally met like a developer who showed me his email in which like Mark zerber emailed him to hire him at meta there was U you know AR from perplexity wanted to hire him at at perplexity so there a there's a huge battle for getting the best talent in companies to become to have that Advantage so how can someone who's in college or you know getting started with their career get access to these opportunities and what how lucrative can these be for for uh big Tech

as well as for startups I think in general right when you're looking for work there's kind of a few strategies right and they all run in parallel one is like you go to a job site you apply you find a job and hopefully someone responds to you right when you're thinking about that approach obviously you need to figure out how do I specifically fit what they're looking for so that I maximize my chance of getting getting a response the second strategy which a lot of people don't do but it's obviously there's a lot of awareness

now and some of this we support is networking right so it's like if you want to work at a specific startup like for me like you know I'm very approachable on LinkedIn so people do reach out to me with their resumés and stuff and I don't respond to everyone or I don't hire everyone but at least you know I've taken a look um if it's a larger company founder like you know I think at this point maybe Mark Zuckerberg is not likely to reply to most people but maybe there's a senior director at meta or

there's you know a senior engineer at one of these companies who you might be able to reach out to genuinely right with a call to action of like hey you know maybe we're from the same school same college or we grew up in the same town or you know I heard this podcast uh you know people are going to now message but the point is that you can actually Reach Out directly or indirectly whatever and you know bypass the traditional hiding pool and the third piece is also you know which is also underlooked is if

you're just doing really good work on your own people will find ways to find you yeah right and so um you know I I I can give an example is I met someone recently at this event and they were building something really interesting there were a student building something really interesting that's relevant to us and so you know they were looking for an internship and I said hey you know we don't hire interns but I said you know what it seems like you've done this really cool and exciting work that's relevant to what we're doing

let's chat right so if you're doing good work and then there's people posting stuff on you know x.com they're making insta reals about the work they've done people are like you know I mean uh GitHub and other sites where there's just develop other develop are starring their work like if you have a cool open source project some somebody might reach out to you and want to hire you because of that so there's a lot of these underrated ways that are just not like go to a school and hope that you know some company comes to

your college and hires you that won't happen now for bigger opportunities I mean it's still going to happen but you know there's a lot of other ways to get those opportunities yeah uh so I mean when I was at Apple we've done that like we've hired actually a lot of people right out of conferences like we just saw the work they did looking at like maybe they get her reposter or maybe even they were a presenter at the conference and we just reached out to them and it just makes total sense to align and what

sort of uh compensation can they expect like what is the salary of these beginner roles maybe you cannot might not be able to share for meta but like in general what does it look like in Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley specifically like you know Bay Area here um again it depends from company to company but anyone who's like coming right out of college with zero experience I would say a base salary of something around maybe 100 to 120 mhm is what I have seen as Trend I mean it could be on the higher side too

with startups which may offer you higher base in and and some Equity options so that compensation structure can vary but like 120 maybe slightly going up you can negotiate if you have multiple offers is what I would see as than standard numbers that's like about one per year I would not go into the the comparison uh but yeah I mean for folks in different countries yeah you could do that conversion and be and feel happy about it that yeah this number we we'll come to that that we talking about SFO and moving year um but

cool so you were talking about conferences and meta just comes in and just hires people I was talking about Apple but yeah I mean that's kind of this landscape for almost every company like that's why we have conferences that's why we do networking figure out people discover people and like Punit very rightly pointed out that when you're doing good work you publish out publish it you you advertise it and people will find ways to discover that and and probably you are the chosen one all right um I want to now talk about the next segment

which is moving to Silicon Valley you know I've been living here for about 10 days I have a flight tonight to LA but uh I want to hear from both of you what has been your experience of living in Silicon Valley how is San Francisco like why should someone think about moving here why do you have you decided to stay here and uh what is the opportunity yeah maybe um I came here like I think I mentioned in the beginning around 2012 time frame and it was very different than what it is right now I

think the biggest learning I've had over the last decade or who have lived here is I think the the kind of innovation which happens here at least from I've spent some time in India as well and then the kind of work which happens here I feel like it is really groundbreaking like it's very and there are multiple reasons to that one is that there's a lot of invest investor money money pouring in and it's like if you have a good idea you have a good like execution strategy around it I think you have a very

high chance of getting funded and take it to the next level of course the bigger companies which you see today they also started one day and it is it is all a culmination of like I don't know 10 15 15 20 years of effort to get to this point and there's a reason why they all exist here and not in other parts of the world of course like climatic conditions are another like factor to it just like we have in Bangalore so people prefer like areas like these where it's something which allows you to like

work throughout the year rather than like you know being very like uh I mean not being able to work in like let's say three months of the year because it's too cold or something and not it's basically Banglore weather but better and with a beach with a with a beach I mean within like 1 hour you get pretty much everything you have mountains you have Beach you drive 3 hours you have Tahoe which you have where you have like a lot of snow and then you drive south you have beaches you drive north you have

beaches like surrounded by Pacific Ocean so so it's I think the the beauty of the nature is just really nice here I think it really excites people to come here but again it's all comes at the cost of taxes so so you have to you have to pay that yeah but cost of living tell me tell me about about that what is the cost of living because for me it's like every day I'm spending at least $100 on Uber and at least $50 on food yeah I mean see you're also you know like visiting here

so so Uber cost I would probably not count into the your daily expenses but yes a meal a regular meal would probably cost you like $ 10 to $15 that's on the Lower Side that's on the lower side if you go in a fancy place that's it be like 25 30 bucks very easily I've never seen a $10 M year I mean if again like you know if you have a burger or something it'll probably cost you that but if you if you go to a fancy restaurant and like have like a couple of dish

having kinoa salad so yeah maybe $5 $20 I would say uh you go to a DA Indian restaurant like even more yeah so so I think yeah but but yeah on a on a daily basis if you have to eat out and like you know survive like that yeah probably you're looking at close to like $80 $90 a day yeah yeah and then what is a living uh rent or rent cost what does it look like I mean rent depends on like multiple things but specifically I mean also you know it's not the whole of

the US that's expensive this way right it's Silicon Valley specifically um maybe New York and like some parts of you know LA and New York and other cities maybe but like this there's like a couple of places that are extremely expensive compared to others and that's also factored into one is the tax so it's just like really high tax here and then also the uh the salaries adjust for that right so when you see this news about like one CR two CR package right but you don't see that they're going to like spend half of

that in tax anyway um but in terms of rent so tax is about 45% 40% 35 to 40% it depends on again your income bra but you can say like maybe standard like around 35 to 40% and then if what state you are in also matters because then there'll be an additional state tax yeah so I've seen a lot of people like my age go to like hacker houses and then just live there so like uh what I saw was that you know like a big V in which the like $10,000 or something in which

like seven eight people are staying and then it gets divided so that becomes a bit more economical but like normally like 2 b seniors like $3,000 $4,000 a month um so that's like the normal range of people are curious yeah like 4,000 for a three two bedroom 2 and a half three is like pretty normal yeah yeah you you can I mean there are fancy ones if you live in SF like next to the Bay Bridge play pay like $5,000 or more but my friend just stays there she just loves it so I mean it's

up to your sort of appetite of how much you want to spend on like your rents but yeah anything from like 3500 to 5,000 is for a 2way two bath apartment but like it gets so expensive why to even like live here it was like my first cost my first thought when I came here like I think it'll at least be like5 to $6,000 to live here per month depending on what you're doing sure but there's two factors right one is why do you want to live here right so if you're like in uh the

movie industry this is probably not the right place for you right if you're in like specific industries that just don't exist here then you you know you should probably consider moving to a better place but if you're in Tech right this is uh and I I strongly believe this this is the place to be Silicon Valley or SF whichever one right and the reason is because everyone else is here for the same reason so everyone works at either you know a really big company who's they've seen Innovation inside these big companies or they've worked at

a startup and seen you know things being built or you know they're part of the ecosystem right um and you know since you've been here in 10 days you've attended a couple events you've been to Stanford right you've understood that there's an ecosystem around here like uh you go to a coffee shop and the person next to you you won't even know there'll be a founder of some company they might be you know a senior person at some uh big tech company or an investor you just don't know and but like it's probably one of

those three yeah right and so you can't get that anywhere else um you know as a startup founder also some some of the benefit is like if I'll just walk into a networking event I have no idea who I'll meet but usually something or the other positive comes out of it because everyone in this area who's attracted to that same event you know they probably had a similar mindset or something you know that's conducive to the environment if I lived in you know like I I joke with my wife like I would rather move to

Bangalore then move to any other place in the US right cuz like there's no environment there for for the tech industry yeah so you know that's kind of the main thing from my perspective yeah I guess I mean pretty much what uh pun mentioned I think the opportunity cost here like you know people come here to make their careers from maybe you know as somebody who was just coming out of college to a senior director or VP if you want to be like pursuing that bigger company route or like you know Punit is on that

entrepreneurial Journey which is again some people really want to like get into that you know path and really build something zero to one and then 1 to 10 and take it like even bigger so the the accessibility to like these you know uh network of people the VCS the other Engineers the networking which you get and it's all knowledge sharing ultimately like you know people want to join you join your hands and take that thing forward which you are pursuing I think it's just easier because you get that platform here yeah yeah it's not I'll

tell you if you go to like places like for example Denver Colorado like you know Texas or some other like midwest states that's just very different I would probably say like maybe like if you go to New York or Boston because that also has some good hacker Vibes yeah Community around it you just say for example the um in New York you have the whole Finance industry Hub so you'll find a lot of like people of that background more than than here so again really like I think the place will Define what sort of platform

and ecosystem it provides simple like mapping to that would be Mumbai you know you have like the big Finance sector there and a lot of people go there just for that reason opportunity cost and Bollywood and Bollywood yeah you know and so another way to think of it is like it's cost versus value right so in a lot of Industries technology is a cost center right I used to work in a financial firm and I Tech was treated like oh this is a cost to us like yes you're providing value but we are spending money

on technology because we're actually a financial company so we make money by doing trading or whatever um and that trickles down into the culture of where you live right whereas in Silicon Valley everybody or not everybody but a large majority of people here are for the tech so Tech drives the ecosystem so being a tech person in Silicon Valley is really useful like being a non- tech person like it's you know your mileage may vary yeah but I I want to just highlight one thing do but like it may sound that everything is just very

you know um like glowy and happy from the outside but there are also struggles I'm sure like everybody goes through their own set of struggles to get what where they are in their lives like you know building a company surviving a lot many years in a big tech company to get to a very senior position it's not like easy so there is a lot of like competition because everybody is there and there's also a lot of like perseverance patience and dedication to what you want to achieve here so it takes time so people sometimes also

get in that state where they are losing motivation because it's maybe monotonous or maybe they're not able to get what they want at the pace they want to achieve that so it can be demotivating at times too so it's not like you know like people say grass is greener on the other side so there's also like some other side of things which people should be aware of in considering this of course not demotivating anyone here people should definitely like you know Loop in and jump in into following their dreams and fulfilling that but yes be

cognizant of that not everything is going to be a happy path yeah but like I feel like what I've observed like living in in San Francisco is that work life balance right like typically I have like developer friends who are in Bangalore so like they would work like we have like Xbox we have like a foood ball table and all but we don't never get to use that but I have seen here people going for runs say what is that pickle swimming I went to the YouTube it has a swimming pool it has a what

ging it has a gym and it even has a slide from the third to the second floor and that's just insane right so they've just built these things and people are just so chill about life is what I have observed right so that looks very cool to to to see that there was a person I met who just had a baby to un he got a 5 month leave vacation it's called baby bonding year apparently yeah I think everybody has like some accessibility to some sort of perks for that matter but again the point is

that perks right like at some point there would be some inflection point and you'll be like I'm done with this I need something new to how do you sustain yourself in that sort of a ecosystem is also like challenging at times yeah um I don't know like you know this is this is like I think it's an individual's Choice as a time it's all about time management to the end of the day like even like you look at C he gets up at 4:00 in the morning going to the gym and still like running a

big tech company like apple so and there are people who are going to be like maybe at home and just lying around and not doing any physical exercise and you may question them like yeah why why aren't you doing this I think it's their own personal choice and question of what you want to do within the time frame you have yeah so I mean you'll find people who are grinding here as well just like those H I've observed the extremes I've seen like the startup people working day in and day out and I've seen like

employees working in big Tech just chilling like while working what I've observed when I went to these offices there's always like some set of people who would do that there always be also senior folks who would also do that nobody likes to live a mundane or monotonous life all you have to figure out is that how do you balance it out M but people literally sleep by 9:30 year is what i' seen I don't these are all like personal choices right like if you go anywhere in the world you'll find people in all spectrums but

uh I mean from a company perspective it's actually very useful to give these perks because a now I'm used to them so now it's harder for me to leave yeah B I'm spending more time in the office right otherwise I would have left the office an hour earlier gone swimming at my local place it would have taken me time to drive back home now I'm tired I'll eat dinner and go to sleep so I mean as a company it's beneficial to give your employees these options and those that want to use it they'll use it

those that don't anyways they're happy doing whatever so you think it is worth it like that the choice that you made to come here and live I think overall I'm happy there are like I'm talking about the perks question at least like you know U like I have been a guy who has never like cooked food by myself like for majority of the time frame and I was used to just eating at company throughout and which was I think something like Punit mentioned like was tying me to be staying at the company for a longer

time which also meant I'll probably be putting in extra hour to do work so the company is extracting that value indirectly by giving me that benefit because it's kind of like hooking me to that that perk to AB like now that you know I'm in a different phase of my my life so we have me and my wife have to talk about let's like have food at home because it's more healthy so they are like trade offs to that yeah but like the best part is the sunny area which is basically India Little India of

of Silicon Valley we we all went to this place called upna Bazar and there you can have free chai you have like proper Indian meal and it's also like affordable and everything so that is like the best part about it if you ever come here you should try try coming here for sure like that's I mean it's crazy we live like two streets away like five five minutes walk Lally I was actually about to come like park my car and like be just walk to his place and I saw he's like literally like because I

go to Safeway for grocery shopping and it's like right on this this road nice amazing this was epic thank you so much what is the one last message that you would give to people who are interested into generative Ai and they want to get started I would say first of all go fulfill your dreams don't stop at any point you want to come to the valley if that's the path you want to pursue do that if that path happens to be on that AI Journey figure out the tools look at the courses discover like be

that curious guy who wants to like discover things and try it out don't be like I'm dependent on somebody to teach me or spoon feed me if you are the guy who has the tenacity to go discover things be curious I think you'll find a way out well I think specifically for Gen right I think uh this is an inflection point in the tech industry you know it happens once every 10 to 20 years so this is the time where everybody's on the equal playing Ground an 18-year-old is equally as capable as a 30y old

as a 50y old right so don't just say feel like you know I'm young and this you know this like I don't know what's going on around me no one knows what's going on and no one will for the next like couple of years because it's moving so fast so try you know available free tools also try you know tools that companies have made specifically for specific use cases and understand and try to learn you know how this technology is being used and use that as a platform uh for how you can do something in

this space if it's interesting to you yeah amazing thank you so much for taking out the time this was ctive AI 101 and/ Silicon Valley overview pun thank you so much you can check them out the socials will be in the descript below and I'll see you in the next one