Riding Rapid Change
By Tom Nault, CEO, Hudson Cloud
Since November 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public, barely a day has gone by without something new to praise in the world of LLMs and AI. We follow the latest news in The Rundown AI every morning. For our company, the evolution began with ChatGPT, using it as an editor before using it for more sophisticated tasks. Then we expanded into some other, more advanced LLMs—in my case, Claude, then Grok, then back to Claude, and then Grok Bot, which is now serving me well.
Grok Bot is moving at a pace of almost daily updates, and I can’t keep up with the updated functionality. Nobody can. Even Grok Bot can’t explain its own updates to me in real time. When I discover new capabilities, I have something to cheer about, but there is no way to wrap it all up in any form of context and share it with you. I’m not saying we’ve reached “the singularity,” but personally, it already feels as though human thinking can’t keep up with AI’s pace. I can’t think faster or absorb these changes and capabilities any more than I already am.
I could spend all day praising Grok Bot and other forms of AI, but the shelf life of writing about it could be measured in hours. It’s now completely meaningless to say anything about my daily use, as the technology seems to race further ahead. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. Our focus as a company is to remain on top of our daily use, and we don’t entirely know how to do that. It’s all uncharted territory. We think of our actual users and what their future looks like.
When I ride one of the very high-speed trains in Japan, I can’t focus on anything outside the window close to the train as it’s hurtling down the tracks. It’s all a blur. Instead, I have to look off into the distance, where everything looks much slower, to enjoy the fast-moving countryside. In a way, this is how we have to operate as a company in this new world. We have to look much further out to understand our needs today.
This is all super fun, but it’s also a mental challenge. I love the challenge, as do the others in the company.
The point is, none of us at Hudson Cloud has it figured out. We’re in the same spot as the people we serve, trying to keep up with something that changes faster than any of us can follow. This will mean we have to come up with new ways of thinking. I’m just admitting that we don’t have it figured out, but we’re up to the challenge.
So, I won’t pretend I can describe every little thing that’s close to the train. What I can tell you is what I see in the distance: the companies that come through this will be the ones that follow some basic rules from our past and check that they still apply. They’ll be the ones whose people were willing to stay beginners, every week, for years. I’ve been a beginner more times in the last two years than in the thirty before that, and I’ve never learned more than I have recently. That’s the only strategy I trust right now: stay coachable, and stay open-minded enough to be constantly surprised and delighted by what comes next. What I love about Hudson Cloud, and what makes the work so meaningful, is that we’re a company made up of very curious people, and that helps us remain grounded through all this. I feel very fortunate to be at the forefront of so much change.
