Latest news with #MarkQuinn
Gizmodo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
The AI Ghost in the Machine Fired Him. Then It Gave Him a New Life
Mark Quinn's story usually begins with an ending: a seasoned tech executive at companies like Apple and Amazon who was, in the ultimate tech irony, laid off because of AI. But the headline misses the real story. The layoff wasn't the end. It was the moment the world changed for him, and the beginning of a journey that saw him turn the very technology that made his job obsolete into his most intimate collaborator, career counselor, and even parenting coach. This isn't just a story about technological disruption; it's a deeply human account of adaptation in the face of obsolescence. It's a roadmap for what comes after the initial shock, when the fear subsides and a single, terrifying question remains: Now what? For Quinn, the answer began with a revelation. Before his departure in May 2023, he had an experience that shook him to his core. An operational challenge that had taken him and his team four months of intense work to solve was presented to GPT-4 as an experiment. 'In 30 seconds, it spit out not only the answer but the complete methodology, what we thought were the clever adaptations we figured out,' Quinn recalls. 'When I saw that, I realized the world has changed. It was that moment that I said we got to be all in.' He was all in, but soon he was all out. The very efficiency he helped implement by ramping down a 3,000-person human workforce with AI ultimately eliminated his own role. He was a ghost in the machine he had helped build. But instead of succumbing to the fear that grips so many, Quinn made a conscious choice. He decided to learn the language of the ghost. 'For me, it was a moment of a wake-up call to realize what is really happening,' he says. 'The world had been flipped upside down. The world is no longer round. Now it's a triangle, and I have to navigate in this new world order.' His first step was to reject the common perception of AI. He implores people to do the same. 'Do not think of AI as a tool. Do not think of it as a search engine,' he insists. 'These companies have done themselves a huge disservice by making them look like chatbots. They are not. The more that you can think of AI as a collaborator, as the world's best expert in whatever you need sitting right there next to you, the more you get out of it.' Putting this theory to the test, Quinn began what he calls the process of 'AI-ifying myself.' He built a custom GPT, a personal AI agent, to guide him. He fed it his resume, his skills, and his fears, and asked it a simple question: What do I do? The result was a detailed, 120-day AI application plan. It told him what to learn, who to talk to, and what tools to master to navigate his new 'triangle world.' It was a curriculum for survival, prescribed by the very force that had threatened it. This new collaboration yielded its most stunning result when Quinn was job hunting. He came across a posting for a role at but initially passed on it. 'It didn't read at all like the sort of jobs that I've done in my past,' he says. A week later, he saw it again. This time, he ran it through his 'career buddy' GPT. The machine's response was a revelation. 'It came back and said, 'Mark, I understand that this doesn't really look like a match on the surface, but you got to look deeper.' And it explained to me the connections I wasn't seeing.' The AI rewrote his resume and cover letter for the role. He got the job. The contrast between his past and present is a vivid snapshot of the future of knowledge work. 'Previously, I led hundreds of thousands of humans in large, operational, complex groups,' Quinn explains. 'And now I lead a team of zero. It's me and my army of agents. I'm here at my desk with four different computer screens, probably six different agents running at any time. And that's my team.' His new job is to rewire the entire company to leverage AI, transforming the work and its people, a role his AI collaborator found for him, a role that didn't exist in his old, round world. But perhaps the most profound transformation has occurred not in his office, but in his home. The ghost has been domesticated. Quinn, a divorced father of two, has brought his AI collaborator into the most intimate corners of his life. He built a 'Kid Coach' GPT, seeded with his own parenting philosophies, to help him navigate everything from setting allowances to helping his children through tough social situations. The most powerful example came from his 13-year-old daughter, who has learning challenges. Her social studies textbook was a nightly source of conflict. The text-to-speech software was robotic and grating. So, Quinn started dropping the chapters into an AI tool and turning them into engaging podcasts. 'It went from me having to argue every night with my kid to get her to read at all, to her looking forward to it and having to time box it because she enjoyed it so much,' he says, the pride in his voice palpable. Yet, this proximity to AI has also surfaced deeper anxieties. The story pivots on a question from his eldest daughter, one that echoes a global fear. 'She has expressed that she is fearful,' Quinn shares. 'She's asked me about, 'Is AI going to take all of our jobs?' and 'Is AI going to run the world?' She did not mean it as a throwaway question. She meant it very sincerely. She's frightened.' It's a moment that grounds the entire narrative. For all his optimism, Quinn understands the fear because he lives with it. His response to his daughter is the same as his message to the world: the concern is valid, but the only way forward is through engagement, not avoidance. We must build the guardrails to ensure AI does good. This leads to the questions that even Mark Quinn, a scout sent ahead into this strange new territory, cannot answer. When conversations turn to the future, to a world where AI performs all entry-level work, he is asked where the next generation of leaders will come from. How do you gain experience when the entry points have been automated away? His answer is refreshingly honest. 'I don't know,' he admits. 'I think that in time, what we will see is my theory, but it's loose, is that we will see something like expanded apprenticeship programs where companies are essentially hiring workers that aren't really doing much work for years to develop them.' It's an amorphous conclusion for an amorphous time. Mark Quinn doesn't have a crystal ball. What he has is a story, a testament that the same force that can feel like a destructive ghost can also become a creative partner. He was caught off guard once. Now, his life's work is to ensure others don't have to be. His message is clear: stop being scared. Get off the bleachers. The game has already started.
Daily Mirror
30-06-2025
- Daily Mirror
Coach's picture driven around tourist hotspot after what he did in nursing home
Mark Quinn became a wanted fugitive after he built a major amphetamine drug ring in a Merseyside nursing home and was ultimately tracked down to a location in the Netherlands A former boxing coach had his picture driven around Spain's Costa del Sol after he used a nursing home for he heart of his trafficking ring. Mark Quinn fled the UK in 2014 after he became wanted over using the empty nursing home for an amphetamine trafficking ring. The "most wanted fugitive" was wanted after police carried out raids in Scotland and Merseyside, crushing the drugs ring. His picture was then driven around Costa del Sol on the side of a van as part of a major National Crime Agency (NCA) campaign, which aimed to catch people abroad. But he was not apprehended until 2021 following a joint operation by the NCA, Police Scotland as well as Dutch counterparts who tracked him down to Maastricht in the Netherlands. Quinn was later extradited to Scotland and appeared at Edinburgh's high court where he admitted to trafficking amphetamines. His downfall began during a search of Alder Grange nursing home in West Derby, Liverpool, that he used to prepare the majority of the drugs for further supply. Quinn, from Stockbridge Village, in Knowsley, Merseyside, was a respected among amateur and professional boxers and worked with a number of prodigies in the city and trained big name fighters at some of Liverpool's top clubs. He also attended a number of high profile media events before big fights and was in the corner on some of the city's biggest boxing nights at the ECHO arena in 2011. He was also friendly with a number of major football players who he crossed paths with during his time as a boxing coach. In 2013, he became wanted following a Police Scotland surveillance probe. In August that year, police watched as drugs were handed over in Lanarkshire before they searched a flat in Paisley, Renfrewshire, where the load was taken for storage. There officers recovered 112kg of class B drugs worth upward of £3million and later discovered Quinn's fingerprints on the packaging. Officers later saw in February the following year a Ford Transit van being driven from Scotland to Liverpool. Quinn was later seen driving the van into the Alder Grange nursing home, where Everton legend Dixie Dean once lived, and he was spotted loading items into the back of the vehicle. The van ended up being stopped northbound on the M74 and was taken to Motherwell police station where it was found to be transporting 100kg of amphetamine worth some £2.4m on the streets. Quinn was seen at a a car auction business in Edinburgh before he travelled to Stepps, North Lanarkshire, with others the following month. He later met with a Scotsman in Liverpool and following a visit to the nursing home the accomplice was later stopped driving north. Quinn was later found to have 100kg of amphetamine worth some 3.2million. Merseyside Police later searched the nursing home with mixing paddles, gloves, basins, and face masks being found alongside barrels of methanol and sulphuric acid which are used to make amphetamine past, the LiverpoolEcho reported. When he returned to Paisley Sheriff Court for sentencing in September 2022, advocate depute David McLean said the amphetamine production line at the nursing home showed a "level of sophistication rarely encountered, and is representative of an established organised criminal network, which operates at the upper levels of drug supply and trafficking." Defence counsel Gail Gianni said there had been a project to turn the nursing home into luxury flats but that it ended up running into financial difficulties. She said: "Mr Quinn would have carried out all the building work and he would have made a substantial sum of money from that project." She said he ran into financial problems and asked "certain people" for a loan of money. She said: "Once he had done that he was easy prey for them." Quinn was ultimately jailed for seven years, procurator for specialist casework Laura Buchan said he "played a significant role in an organised criminal network involved in the international supply and trafficking of drugs."
Business Insider
21-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
I made an AI tool to run my job search, and it helped me get my dream role
Mark Quinn is the senior director of AI operations for Pearl, an AI search platform for professional services. Before getting the job, the longtime tech exec, who'd held leadership roles at Waymo, Apple, and LinkedIn, created an artificial intelligence tool, now called CareerBuddy GPT, to help level up his search. The tool determined whether he was a good fit, updated his résumé to highlight relevant experience, wrote cover letters, and identified people to contact about the position. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity. When I turned to AI to help with my job search, I was five months into it and wasn't getting the traction that I thought I would get. I felt like I had done everything, which obviously was not the case. When you're in a moment like this, you can feel stuck and be blinded to the possibilities. So, I went to AI and said, "I don't know what to do. I'm an exec in tech, and here's my résumé. I'm applying to these jobs, and I'm not having a lot of success." It was able to walk me back from the edge and say, essentially, "Look, you're at this level, and your average job search time should be ABC, and you're only this far in. So, first, calm down." It sounds silly, but it was really helpful to hear. Then it went on to say, "Now, let's talk about some things. I'm hearing what you did do, but here are some things that maybe you could do that I'm not hearing." A research partner Some of its suggestions were unexpected. One was to make a cake for someone, because it was a company that appreciates bold moves. I don't know if that was really good advice, but it did come up with that. It would also suggest how to tailor a message to a particular person. Or, for example, to use email, not LinkedIn, because they're not active on LinkedIn — those sorts of tidbits. One of the taglines I've developed from my experience is that one way to think about AI is not as a tool but as the world's best expert in whatever you need help with. The more you leverage AI through that lens, the more you get out of it. I used it to create what's called a panel of experts. Now, you've got AI playing multiple roles at once. It can slice and dice and give you different views and a synthesized opinion. Another example is downloading the profile information for the person you're going to interview with. You can have AI assume the role of the interviewer and do a mock interview, and you can do it live with your voice, and then get feedback on how you performed. It also started calling out things like applying to incremental CEO roles. It recommended doing more cold outreach, which I hadn't leaned into too much. It helped me figure out a plan that worked for me and language that worked for me to do that, and it gave me concrete steps. 'You're missing it' The way that I ended up at Pearl is interesting. When I saw the job description, I passed it up because, on paper, it's different from anything I'd done before. Now it's laughable, because I'm in it, and everybody's connecting my passion and my past with the role. Maybe a week later, I saw the posting again and thought, "Why am I saying 'no' to myself? Let me just drop this thing into CareerBuddy GPT and see what it says. I didn't think that I was qualified, but I said, "Give me your objective assessment." It came back and said, "Hey, you're missing it. Your résumé doesn't speak to it, but here's how your experience aligns." It encouraged me to apply. So, then I did the network outreach, and I had a connection, which helped open the door. One thing led to the next. But what got me to apply was leveraging AI to the extent of not only answering, but also truly advising. I say trust, but verify. It told me to do something different than what I thought was right. I can represent me, what I am, and what I'm not. AI can look between the lines and challenge and question. When I was interviewing with our CEO, he asked me, toward the end of the interview, what my dream job was. I got about 15 to 20 seconds into stumbling around, and I said, "Look, I'm just going to be honest with you. I don't know how to spin this to make it sound good, because the honest answer is this: This job is my dream job." No more throwing darts After I started using AI, my job search still took a bit of time — maybe another five months or so. But I went from feeling like I was just throwing darts to where it felt much more targeted and precise. And, I'd gone from essentially getting no response to finding the right opportunities, having conversations, and it was a matter of finding the right fit. That can take time. We're in a moment when people and companies are about to be left behind, and I want to help that not be the case. The opportunity to go to a company that really gets it, is going after this full force, and wants to rewire with AI — that sounds like the hardest role of my career, but also the most fun and the most relevant thing I could be doing for this moment. So, not only did I stumble into the job, but I stumbled into my dream job.
Business Insider
29-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
I lost my job to AI, but then used it to supercharge my search for a new role
Mark Quinn is the senior director of AI operations for Pearl, an AI search platform for professional services. In a prior role at a startup, the arrival of OpenAI's GPT-4 meant artificial intelligence could do the work of a team he was building. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity. In my last job, I was at a startup. Before that, I was leading engineering operations at Waymo. It was a 3,000-person organization, a rocket ship all its own. In other words, my career was fairly well established and going well by most indications. So, when the startup came along, it was about this bigger swing and this even bigger opportunity, potentially, to help this company unlock what they were going after. My main role in that was to lead what was the primary human-in-the-loop operation responsible for supervising and curating the AI. When I joined, it was already a 500-person strong organization, and I was hired to ramp it to thousands. By all indications, we were doing the job really well. Then GPT-4 came out. After playing with it for just a couple of months, we realized that the bulk of the operation that I was scaling, really the entirety of it, was no longer needed. The technology had simply outpaced itself and the human in the loop. I then spent my last few months there ramping that operation down and setting up a couple of other AI-related agents to help with things like quality technical writing. Once that was in place, my skills simply weren't needed there. It was not a super fun moment, and it was very, very bumpy. We had hundreds of people doing this work globally, so we had to figure out how to ramp down those contracts as gracefully as possible to allow these folks to have time to hopefully get into other roles. On my team of about 10 people, only one person stayed on. 'Info workers beware' In my career, I'd gone from a place where companies like Waymo, Apple, and Amazon were coming to hire me to being out of a job and unable to get the attention of any company. This moment is making it such that these great companies now have way more capability and people than they may need. So, you've got a lot of great people that are now having to find their next play, but the next plays are dramatically changing. When I was hired at the startup, I spent the next four months with my team working tirelessly on basically solving this case and figuring out the right staffing and management model. Then GPT-4 came out, and when I gave it the case, it was an epiphanal moment. It spit out the exact answer — the perfect answer — in 30 seconds, including what we thought were very clever adaptations that had taken us a week to identify. It not only gave us the answer but also the methods. I just sat there with my jaw in my hand. That was the moment that I thought to myself, "Info workers beware." My own pivot After we began to wind down the operation, I started looking around to figure out what my next play would be. I spent about five months conducting my job search the wrong way and getting nowhere. I remember this moment sitting there, again, with my jaw in my hand, wondering, "What am I doing wrong?" It came out of that moment of almost desperation, saying, "I've asked everybody else. AI, what do you got?" It came back with more nuance and appreciation than I ever could have imagined. That's when I moved into collaboration mode with AI. One example was with Google's NotebookLM. When it came out, people had fun with the idea of putting their résumés into it and creating a podcast. I actually found incredible utility in doing that. It's interesting to drop your résumé and your LinkedIn profile into NotebookLM and see what AI makes of your career. What does it call out as the highlights? When I did this, I realized that there were great things about my background and experiences that I wasn't telling people because I didn't see or appreciate them, but this podcast called them out. Before using AI, I wrote a nice cover letter, updated my résumé, and started looking around on LinkedIn and applying. I was using my network, casting the line. I wasn't just in a corner quietly hoping something would come to me, but it was the traditional approach of, "Here's the résumé that I made for every job. Here's a cover letter with a few tweaks." I was essentially cold applying and trying to hit people up on LinkedIn. Most people have probably heard that you should tailor your résumé, cover letter, or communications for a role. But that's hard when you're in the grind and just trying to get a job. You've already applied to a bunch, and you're tired and don't want to stare at the same words again and again. This is where AI is extremely helpful. I also created what I called JobHunt GPT. Now I've turned it into CareerBuddy GPT, but JobHunt GPT was what came out of all this exploration. In my case, it was a custom GPT that understood my background, where I was trying to go, and the history of the jobs I'd applied for. So, I was able to go to it and say, "Hey, here's a new job. Can you assess my candidacy for this?" The first thing I get is an objective review of how I mesh up against a role. Then, I can say, "Alright, pick apart my résumé. What do I need to adjust?" It can generate the updated résumé, focusing on the things that are important for the role. And it can write the cover letter and identify the key people for me to reach out to. It's essentially like lead analysis and lead development. My advice to anybody else would be, don't wait five months to figure out the right way to do it. The world has changed. This applies to anything, but especially if you're looking for a job, you have to leverage the most powerful tool available, which is AI.
CBC
21-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
Eligible N.L. patients can now book their own screening for breast and colon cancer
The rates of colon cancer in Newfoundland and Labrador are dramatically higher compared to the rest of the country. Breast cancer rates are also higher. Now, waiting for a referral to get screened for the diseases is no more. The CBC's Mark Quinn reports.
