Wizards and Librarians: The Archetypes Behind Technological Breakthroughs
Invent, organize, scale, repeat
I know that magic doesn’t exist, except there were several moments in my life that sure felt like it did.
I’m almost sure this is how you feel, too.
For me, those moments were:
✶ Connecting to the internet with a dial-in modem in 1997, and downloading my first Windows wallpaper, displaying an X-Wing and a Tie Fighter.
✶ Getting my first Sony Discman and listening to music while riding the bus to school.
✶ Playing Fallout 3 for the first time, wandering around the enormous and immersive open world.
✶ Getting in touch with long-lost friends on Facebook.
✶ Fitting my first machine learning model in scikit-learn, classifying handwritten digits from the MNIST dataset using random forests.
✶ Prompting ChatGPT to create a complex Python script from scratch.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — as Arthur C. Clarke wrote.
Since I’ve come to my senses (sadly, only in my late teenage years), I have wanted to be such a wizard, crafting and casting the spells our lives are built upon. As I grew in age, I first became a researcher and then a builder. With time and experience, I have realized that I’m missing something.
Wizards might build and apply spells, but librarians are the ones that make spells accessible for all of us. We get to be wizards because of the librarians!
GPT-4o is a spell. PyTorch is a spellbook.
In time, my collection of foundational memories has expanded with subtle, not necessarily jaw-dropping, moments. Moments that shaped me as much as those first brushes with magic.
🗎 Using the internet via a fiber optic cable without my mother yelling at me to stay off the phone lines so she could finally make the call.
🗎 Subscribing to Spotify and realizing in the middle of a four-hour train ride that even though I forgot to pre-download the album Annihilation by the Wicked by the death metal band Nile, I can just stream it.
🗎 Playing indie games made with the Unreal engine, realizing that AAA quality games are now possible by solo developers.
🗎 Implementing custom neural network architectures in Keras, testing out new ideas in a matter of minutes instead of days.
🗎 Avoiding social media and only reading AI-generated digests to prevent doomscrolling and information overload.
🗎 Fetching a model from Hugging Face and fine-tuning on my custom data instead of training a deep convolutional network from scratch.
At heart, I’m a librarian. All of my most significant projects were made with this mindset; even my social media biographies say, “I want to democratize machine learning” in one way or another. That’s peak librarian behavior.
Shopify. Epic Games. PyTorch. Hugging Face. Thousands of successful enterprises, created to put spells into your hands. Our world is built both by wizards and librarians. The mainstream is biased towards the spellcasters, but the scholars make it all possible.
Wizards invent; librarians organize and scale.
If you are a builder at heart and reluctant to jump from trend to trend and try to stay on top, you should consider the alternate strategy.
The next Library of Alexandria won’t build itself. Maybe you’re the one to do it.