A few weeks ago, I became a Google Developer Expert for AI at the age of 47! Someone said I’m TOO OLD for this so I thought I'll post here to share my perspective on it.
@GoogleDevExpert is a recognition given to people across categories such as AI, Cloud, Flutter & more based on their knowledge & community contributions. Less than 1500 GDEs globally!
I've not been very active on
@X and I probably wouldn't have posted it all - if it was not for an interaction which left me questioning how people judge on age - in addition to ethnicity, skin colour, religion, gender & more!
At a recent event, I got introduced to this 20-something CEO who claimed he knew it all, a self proclaimed expert building the next BIG THING on AI.
Then he asked me what model I thought was best for few-shot learning in multilingual NLP.
I said:
“Depends — are you optimising for inference latency or token accuracy on code-mixed datasets?”
He blinked. Paused. Then changed the topic to the fact that he's about to hit 100K subscribers on YouTube teaching AI.
He didn’t know what few-shot meant.
Didn’t understand what code-mixed datasets were.
But had plenty of opinions — including that I was too old to be in AI. And add to that, his YouTube fan following - probably all AI generated content.
So here’s to the late bloomers.
To the second careers.
To everyone who’s been told they missed the bus.
🚫 You’re not too old.
⏳ You’re right on time.
🔥 Keep learning. Keep building. Keep showing up.
At 47, I became a Google Developer Expert in AI - my knowledge matters, not my receding hairline.
And I’m just getting started.
@googledevs @GoogleAI
#GoogleDeveloperExpert #GDE #AI #GenAI #GoogleDevelopers