Ask HN: Generative AI makes me want to quit the industry

2 pointsrafiki62y ago2 comments

I appreciate the hype, I get it, productivity booster yada yada. I just don't have the energy to keep up with it. I got a Masters and got into ML thinking we had time. My domains were mostly about NLP, even though I never enjoyed it much. For most applications businesses have, GPT4 is sufficient. It can behave as a general purpose classifier and even recommendation engine. It's just too big.

I feel like my options are to try a pivot towards non-generative CV or IoT/Forecasting/tabular data, but even those have mostly been commoditized.

I feel like your only shot of doing interesting work in software is to get into a group working on a foundational problem that's high risk.

Otherwise I think this field is on a slow death march. I don't think we will recover this bubble and achieve a ridiculous job market ever again. Companies are all getting wise to what GPT4 can do, and GPT5 is coming within the year.

Honestly progress is great, but humans are getting left behind. That's fine I guess, I just want to be able to plan for it and adjust.

Is anyone else just done?

2 comments

ChopSticksPlz2y ago

Embrace it instead of fighting it. Delegate simple tasks to GPT, I found it useful as an example generator. There are so many niches you can create software for, not necessarily well paid but fun and with new tools like AI you may deliver solutions quicker. That being said, I kinda feel sorry for all these folk who jumped into the IT bandwagon with dreams of making more money without actually having deep tech background. I guess, AI backed tools will reduce need for junior positions significantly very soon.

rafiki6OP2y ago

It's easy to say embrace it, but we aren't that far off from a fully capable developer. People are already stitching task based flows to make it basically build a whole thing and a big thing.

The majority of the software industry is in a lot of trouble and honestly given that it was one of the highest paying industries that's not great for the economy.

What are people supposed to even do? What's next for all these displaced workers?

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