I’d like to write an entire blog post about this with both of my perspectives, but maybe another time. I’ve been an early adopter for decades (Bitcoin in 2012, ETH in December 2015, AI/ANN/ML in 2017ish, and have been following this trend since the beginning including beta access to most of the tools). I’ve been on both sides of this argument, and am the type that has extremely high standards.

At first, I thought of it like a toy, sort of cool, fun to play around with, but not much “real” value. I believe that it still produces crap code, but it’s getting better. I do believe that we’re seeing diminishing returns and that it won’t ever fully surpass human level code quality/performance at mature organizations. I like to see all angles to get a better and more logical perspective of this situation. Here’s my take:

In the care that AI does take our jobs, and the worst case scenario does come to fruition, I’m not worried. Here’s why, we’ll be some of the last people who should worry. Management, financial services, communications, customer service, etc should all feel more threatened than us based on the skill barrier alone. My personal opinion is that, if LLMs can do our jobs, then it can do basically all of the white collar jobs too. It’s like worrying about the stock market crashing to 0, if that does happen , you’ve got even bigger problems than your portfolio lol.

On the other side, if LLMs don’t take our jobs, and instead augment parts of our work (as well as other fields), then the valuation that investors are putting on LLMs is also flawed, and that means this is also a bubble (similar to the dot com bubble). Remember, a bubble doesn’t mean the tech is bad or not valuable, it means that the the valuations are simply far to grandiose and divorced from reality. I believe this is the more likely outcome, given that history does repeat itself. I also believe that we’re in a recession right now and am waiting for the official GDP data from Q2 of this year to confirm this. The pattern reminds me of the dot-com bubble too much and humans are gonna be humans.

On the more nuanced side, I believe it’ll be a short term thing. They’ll try to replace us, and find out just how badly that goes. In fact, human stupidity is a part of this problem. It’s not about logic, it’s about fear and greed, as well as human emotion. Just use LLMs to the best of your abilities, and use it in places where it helps you, not where it helps everyone else. I believe in keeping an open mind, and trying it out. If it slows you down, then don’t use it for that thing. It’s simple. It’s my belief that most of the emotions are not from LLMs but from the few people with megaphones trying to push a narrative and stoke fear. Most of the people who make these extremely grandiose claims stand to reap financial rewards from those same claims, so why would they stop? Evaluate people’s opinions by their experience, not their prestige, wealth, or perceived intelligence. It’s the same logic for why you wouldn’t ask an overweight person how to get ripped lol. Trust your experience, and your intuition, and question the narrative by simply asking “is there a financial benefit for them to say this?”.

On the bright side, either way we’ll be fine. If we’re not, we’ve got bigger problems to worry about.