AI Interview Questions Test You, Not the Machine

AI interview questions test whether you can explain something out loud. Cardinal can produce an answer. Cardinal cannot be asked.

Cardinal Rules. A Saturday cartoon about AI and databases.

Cardinal has found my book 100 AI Interview Questions and Answers for Data Professionals and now uses it the way a cat uses a laser pointer, which is to say, on somebody else.

Question 34 is about embeddings. Sam gives the plain answer. Text goes in, a long list of numbers comes out, and things that mean similar things land near each other. That is why search finds the document about slow disks when you typed storage is crawling.

Then Sam turns the book around, and there is the joke. Cardinal can produce that answer instantly and still cannot be asked the question. Nobody is sitting across the table. Nobody is watching a person work out how much they understand while they say it.

This is the part of hiring that AI did not touch. An interview was never a lookup. It is somebody checking whether you can hold an idea, turn it over, and hand it to a colleague in words they can use on Monday. A candidate who explains a vector in plain language at a whiteboard has told you something about the next two years.

The questions became easy to answer. Being the person who gets asked did not.

Cardinal Rule

The machine can answer. Only a person can be asked.

Practice saying it out loud. That is the entire test.

Cardinal is on chapter two and has begun grading people. On the desk this season: AI: Nobody’s in There. But we’re still in here. (on Amazon) and 100 AI Interview Questions and Answers for Data Professionals (Kindle, also on Amazon.in, paperback and audiobook).

Next Saturday is Halloween, and Cardinal opens a procedure nobody has touched since 2011.

An interview is not a lookup, it is a short audition for explaining things.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.