What it feels like to work in AI right now
From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time.<p>I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were cool. I don’t know that I need this every day.<p>I’ve seen examples of “write an email to my boss”. It would take me longer to explain to ChatGPT what I want than to write these myself.<p>I’ve seen “write a snippet of code” demos. But I hardly care about this compared to designing a good API; or designing software that is testable, extensible, maintainable, and follows reasonable design principles.<p>In fact, <i>no one</i> in my extended sphere of friends and family has asked me <i>anything</i> about chatGPT, midjourney, or any of these other models. The only people I hear about these models from are other tech people.<p>I can see that these models are significantly better than anything before, but I can’t see yet the “killer app”. (For comparison, I don’t remember anyone in my orbit predicting search or social networking being killer apps for the internet—but we all expected things like TV and retail sales to book online.)<p>What am I missing?