A little off-topic, but I feel like people here have a good head on their shoulders.
I used to be quite good at making software. Was lucky enough to do engineering work at a “fairly high level.”
For most of my career, I was driven by mastery. Doing hard things, being perceived as smart, etc.
It’s not that things are no longer hard. People just don’t know enough anymore to recognize when something’s hard or when someone is skilled.
This attitude created a plague, where recognition no longer exists due to mass ignorance. It’s ruined any desire I have to do the thing I was once passionate about.
I’ve moved away from making software for software’s sake. I’m focusing more on business modeling and supporting decision-making now.
Even so, making software through AI, just as the means to accomplish other things, with real commercial value, has become insufferable to me.
The situation is made so much worse from the constant pressure to cut corners, close your eyes, and prompt. I swear I spend more time cussing out AI for doing things wrong than if I’d written the thing myself.
For the record, I still think quality matters. The hard part is convincing anyone else to give a ****, because everyone else stopped caring long ago.
I know this is all a symptom of something much worse. And for the first time, I’m genuinely scared for our future.
If one can already feel this purposeless, one can only imagine what things will be like in 5-10 years.
Purposeless or not, I’m tired of being gaslit about the capabilities of AI. I’ve spent A LOT of time building custom agents, AI pipelines, prompting frameworks, and even fine-tuning my own models across domains.
Fine-tuning tiny models is the ONLY thing that’s come close to impressing me.
So imagine that with each new release of a multi-trillion parameter “frontier” model, I feel more emotionally abused. I really can’t tell the difference between one release and the next, and I’m very skeptical that other people can.
It’s also pretty obvious to me that token prediction will not be the innovation leading to AGI. The written word is an extremely lossy compression of actual thought. Again, I feel gaslit when people say otherwise with such confidence.
But hey, large models are the only thing that justifies the current spend on components, compute, and datacenter builds. I’m not sure ANYONE can track the circular and incestuous funding relationships between these companies anymore.
All this to say, that large models aren’t the way.
I’m not even sure how to feel at this point.
I wasn’t planning on writing this much or this incoherently. But my thoughts are out there now. If you’re reading these words, thanks for giving me a moment of your time.
