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.I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were cool. I don’t know that I need this every day.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.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.In fact, no one in my extended sphere of friends and family has asked me anything about chatGPT, midjourney, or any of these other models. The only people I hear about these models from are other tech people.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.)What am I missing?