Hearing Alex Pollock discuss artificial intelligence mentoring has a certain magnetic appeal. The area seems to be shifting in intensity, like a Wi-Fi signal bursting upon a reset. Alex takes you into actual stories, warts and all, not only tosses buzzwords. He has negotiated busy startup evenings driven by cold coffee and stayed in rooms where change is the only constant. Real mentoring, in his view, is not a luxury; rather, it is the engine under the hood driving aspirational brains faster and more brilliantly.
One of the most underappreciated elements in artificial intelligence mentoring, Alex notes is vulnerability. Fresh faces in the tech industry sometimes worry about looking stupid, but he argues that nobody learns from posing as they already know it all. Consider the story he relates of Maya, a junior data scientist who unintentionally deleted a vital dataset while trying to fix a production fault. Everyone started to panic. Alex sat down with her and broke out what happened rather than engaging in the blame game. “The lesson?” he smiles, “Every line of code is a teacher, especially the buggy ones!”
He also highly values cross-disciplinary interactions. Alex exhorts people not to box themselves. Artificial intelligence interacts with ethics, linguistics, even philosophy in addition to codes. Not so long ago, he organized a spirited argument with an ethicist, a cognitive neuroscientist, and a software engineer. Should language models admit when they get responses incorrect? The revelations shot like firecrackers, igniting fresh ideas in all directions.
For Alex, mentoring is not something you could schedule on your Google Calendar in a formal hour. It’s a mosaic of little events—a Slack message from a senior engineer during a difficult sprint, coffee machine guidance, or an unannounced “you got this” following a failed experiment. Mentoring, he laughs, “a bit like debugging code, just with more emotional bandwidth.”