Engaging with genAI Beyond the Hype

The change brought by genAI, especially LLM, has been fast and big. While the downsides have been widely discussed, the hype keeps pushing people to worry: what should I do? Where are we going? In this talk I explore the trends in February 2026, as well as the two strategies of "Pioneers" and "Adopters" to manage the wave of change.

Transcript

1. Engaging with genAI Beyond the Hype Erin Casali
2. MSc + Patent Virtual Assistant Design AI Features Advisor AI Startups Product & Design AI Strategy Make & Learn AI Personal mini-apps & experiments SMARTER, SIMPLER, SOCIAL
3. Big picture
4. Societal impact Important, but not today’s topic Privacy Jobs Copyright Psychosis Biases Climate Misinformation
5. Seen as hater by lovers Seen as lover by haters
6. Diminishing core tech returns. Shift: harnesses, tool use, UI. Signal MMLU-Pro (2026 Feb 14) Graph by Alex Ellman (2026 Feb 14)
7. Signal Compute costs going down. Arti fi cialAnalysis.ai/trends (2026 Feb 14)
8. Signal Open source models run local. LMStudio Kimi K2.5 GLM 4.7 Qwen3 Gemma3 DeepSeek R1
9. Fears
10. I worry I won’t like my job anymore
11. Counter Recenter on what you enjoy Where can genAI support that?
12. SKILLS REFRAMING Vibe
 coding Vibe
 engineering Write code with LLMs without reviewing the code written Build software using production-level engineering practices
13. I worry I will be replaced
14. Counter Do not believe the hype What can genAI actually do?
15. AI hallucinations spring from their fundamental construction — Dilek Hakkani-Tür (CS Professor / Principal Scientist Alexa AI) “ LLMs will inevitably hallucinate if used as general problem solvers — Z. Xu, S. Jain, M. Kankanhalli (2025) Hallucination is Inevitable “ 7~10 % about 1 out of 12 HALLUCINATION RATE Calibration—and, hence, errors—is a natural consequence — A. T. Kalai, O. Nachum, S. S. Vempala, E. Zhang (OpenAI) “ Vectara, 5 Feb 2026 7.8 % Gemini 2.5 Flash 10.8 % ChatGPT 5.2 High 10.9 % Claude Opus 4.5 7.0 % Gemini 2.5 Pro
16. I worry I can’t keep up with change
17. Counter Do not get sucked in Can you skim to fi nd patterns?
18. Most AI news 
 is PR Find 
 good sources
19. Adoption
20. Di ff usion of Innovation INNOVATORS EARLY 
 ADOPTERS EARLY 
 MAJORITY LAGGARDS LATE 
 MAJORITY E. Rogers (1962)
21. Adoption of AI INNOVATORS EARLY 
 ADOPTERS EARLY 
 MAJORITY LAGGARDS LATE 
 MAJORITY Microsoft (2026) “Global AI Adoption in 2025”
22. Secondary Waves of Change INNOVATORS EARLY 
 ADOPTERS EARLY 
 MAJORITY LAGGARDS LATE 
 MAJORITY
23. Positioning Strategies INNOVATORS EARLY 
 ADOPTERS EARLY 
 MAJORITY LAGGARDS LATE 
 MAJORITY Pioneers Adopters
24. Pioneers Time to dedicate Dead ends Fun from exploring
25. Adopters Don’t worry Wait for case studies Wait for features Befriend pioneers
26. News
27. To navigate AI news ask yourself WHAT?!
28. AUTOMATION & DECISION MAKING REASONING & DEDUCTION PREDICTION & FORECASTING GENERATION & TRANSFORMATION PATTERN RECOGNITION PERSONALIZATION WHAT?! Winnow Rich open natural dialogue Manipulate & summarize text Generate content Generate synthetic data Extract structured data Transcribe speech Translation Classi fi cation & tagging Extract text from images Identify objects in images Trend analysis (past) Forecasting (future) Anomaly detection Recommendations Adaptive interfaces Optimization Planning & sequencing Logical inference AI Capabilities Map
29. WHAT?! Winnow AUTOMATION & DECISION MAKING REASONING & DEDUCTION PREDICTION & FORECASTING GENERATION & TRANSFORMATION PATTERN RECOGNITION PERSONALIZATION LLM LLM, ML Transformer Networks Transformer Networks, BERT CNN, Multi-modal LLM ML ML LLM, ML Expert Systems LLM ML, Symbolic Reasoning AI Capabilities Map: Underlying Tech
30. WHAT?! Winnow Action Swap “AI” mentions with the speci fi c tech in your brain.
31. WHAT?! Herds Doomers Boomers “AI is inevitable, and will save the world (we must be fi rst)” “AI is inevitable, and will destroy the world (we must be fi rst)” Karen Hao (2025)
32. WHAT?! Herds Users Destroyers “AI is horrible, we need to stop it at any cost” “AI is here, I just want to use it if it’s ok with y’all”
33. WHAT?! Herds Identify which side is speaking in the news you are reading. Action
34. WHAT?! Adoption Look for patterns and trends
35. WHAT?! Adoption Rule of three: once you see the same concept in the news thrice, check it. Action
36. WHAT?! Try Do not believe the hype
37. WHAT?! Try Scan for use cases, then give it 10 minutes to try it. Action
38. Wrap
39. Permission to feel If you like, learn and have fun If you do not like, learn and understand
40. Permission to choose Pioneer or Adopter
41. Permission to ignore WHAT?! approach to AI news
42. “ ” Karen Hao ‘Empire of AI’ The name artificial intelligence was a marketing tool from the very beginning
43. Thanks. IntenseMinimalism.com — READ MORE & FOLLOW ON —