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It's exciting and cool, but don't quit your job based on an emotional decision

I'm just skeptical on how OpenAI fixes the blog spam issue you mentioned. Im sure someone has already started doing the math on how to game these systems and ensure that when you ask ChatGPT for recipe recs, it's going to spout the same spam (maybe worded a bit differently) and we'll soon all get tired of it again.

Everything's changing, but everything's also getting more complicated. Humans still need apply.

Definitely not an emotional decision. I strongly believe we're going to see a massive shift for rational reasons :)

OpenAI fixes this issue by not giving you two pages of the history of this recipe and the grandmother that originated it and what the author's thoughts are about the weather. It's just the recipe. No ads. No referral links. No slideshows. You don't have to click through three useless websites to find one with meaningful information, you don't have to close a thousand modals for newsletters and cookie consent and log-in prompts.

yeah its gonna do what google became. giving you the most consensual or even sponsored recipe. in some ways that's also the end of mankind as it was in all its genius and variations. and that aligns very well with the conspiracy theory that the 1% want the middle class to disappear into a consumer class of average IQ. because the jobs that will disappear first wont be the bluecollar ones. chatgpt will lower the global IQ of mankind in ways that tiktok could not even dream.

This is absolutely an emotionally impulsive decision. I implore you to reconsider.

If you've always wondered about and scoffed at how people fall for things like Nigerian Prince scams and cryptocurrency HELOC bets, this is it, what you're experiencing right now, this intense FOMO, it's the same thing that fools cool wine aunts into giving their savings to Nigerian princes.

Tread lightly. Stay frosty.

> This is absolutely an emotionally impulsive decision.

On Monday, I would have agreed with you. Today, I am thinking not so much.

Unless you are heavily invested in whatever you are working on, I would definitely consider jumping ship for an AI play.

The main reason I am sticking around my current role is that I was able to convince leadership that we must consider incorporation of AI technology in-house to remain competitive with our peers. I was even able to get buy-in for sending one of our other developers to AI/ML night classes at university so we have more coverage on the topic.

I have three weeks until I plan to give notice, so I'll take your perspective to heart and give it time to reconsider, of course. I appreciate the feedback.

From my perspective this isn't about anyone trying to convince me of anything and I'm falling for it. My beliefs on the future of software are based on a series of logical steps that lead me to believe most software development, and frankly any software with user interfaces, will mostly cease to exist in my lifetime.

You definitely sound all emotional. Take it easy.

Hard for me to be objective about this so I believe you. I'm sure there's emotions there.

Just wanted to say I am personally feeling super emotional about this.

The scary things for me are:

A, this happened once before with my career path, I started my working life in journalism and the bottom fell out of the market in 2008 and never recovered. Newspapers went from paying £300 per 1000 words to paying nothing at all (but you get the kudos of being published for your copywriting career). I had a friend still hanging on in the industry around 2010. She was earning £16k per year for a job as the news-editor for two local newspapers in London. None of my friends still work on the industry. Even the BBC people I knew quit.

B, a lot of software is to do with automating the work of other people. If that work is itself so easy to do that even software developers aren’t needed, then what does that mean for all of the rest of society who get their jobs automated? Does the economy just crash and burn?

Someone still has to talk to the computer and make it do stuff. That’s us. That won’t change even if how we do it changes.

Are you quitting your job because you think you’re being made obsolete and are getting ahead of layoffs? What are you thinking of pivoting to?

Or are you quitting to start something?

It's not that I fear being obsolete within the period of time I'd stay at this job naturally. And definitely don't fear being laid off, though my employer is doing some layoffs right now and hasn't announced it. It's that I don't want to be working towards advancing my career in a direction that I don't see being very relevant in the long term. Relevancy and meaning in my work is important to me. And to clarify, I think product management will stay relevant for a long time, just not the software I'm building or how it's being built where I work.

I will likely pivot to something close to product management, maybe closer to solutions engineering (which I've done before). Something slightly more hands-on in terms of using the tooling we're seeing today, but not so hands-on that I'm programming all day.

I saw and still see denial in the art, photography and design community. But with each release of Standard Diffusion and Midjourney is obvious that photographers are becoming obsolete. As one human who decided to change my job 6 months ago based on what I saw in the field of AI, I can say it was a good decision. I believe that the same will happen to a lot of developers and people working in the tech industry in the following year.

Think about why those things exist, though.

Not that the way the internet operates has to continue -- in fact I'm pretty sure it can't -- but a lot of stuff exists only because someone figured out a way to pay for it to exist. If you imaging removing those ways then you're also imaging getting rid of a lot of that stuff unless some new ways to pay for it all are found. Hopefully less obnoxious ways, but they could easily be more obnoxious.

There is a two part problem here. A lot of good stuff only exists because of ads. We want that to remain somehow.

But the converse is a huge and ever-growing ocean of bullshit exists to siphon the ad dollars off while doing nothing to actually earn it.

Something has to break, and I guess we'll see what really soon.

I think a more rational approach would be to join a company in the AI field, rather than quitting on the spot because you think the robots are going to shortly take-over.

That's what I'm implying - I'm not retiring with the hopes of AI robots hand feeding me grapes in 5 years. I'm quitting because I think my skills and experience in building CRUD apps on the same data concepts a thousand times over is about to be pretty useless knowledge.

> No Ads

At the moment. Although, this does seem like a chance to reset the economics of the "web". I can see enough people be willing to pay a monthly fee for an AI personal assistant that is genuinely helpful and saves time (so not the current Alexa/smart speaker nonsense), that advertising won't be the main monetization path anymore.

But, once all the eyeballs are on a chatbot rather than Google.com what for-profit company won't start selling advertising against that?

There is also the question what happens to the original content these LLMs need to actually make their statistical guess at the next word. If no one looks at the source anymore and its all filtered through an LLM is there any reason to publish to the web? Even hobbyists with no interest in making any money might balk knowing that they are just feeding an AI text.

>There is also the question what happens to the original content these LLMs need to actually make their statistical guess at the next word.

The LLMs get granted the capacity to explore their environment physically and gather data on their own. The recent PaLM-E demo shows a possible direction.

This is how we all die. Considering how humans treat other animals don’t expect an AI made in our own image to let us just happily carry on surviving.

Lmao, people aren't willing to pay a monthly fee for anything unless they are absolutely forced to, but they also complain about ads.

The big issue is moving free with ads ---> paid with no ads + extra features; people froth at the mouth.

Hell, just Youtube premium gets enough people angry, being self-entitled and furious that YT dare charge for a service w/o ads, or complaining that it's the creators that generate all the content anyway. Meanwhile my brah YT over here having to host/serve hundreds of thousands or even millions of "24 hours of black screen" or "100 hour timer countdown" or "1 week 168 hour timer countdown", like what the actual fuck.

OpenAi can't even fix the outage issue. Relax. This is the fire and motion strategy. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

If they were a company about infrastructure products, or they were using GPT-4 to manage their infrastructure, I'd weight that more heavily ;)

For all practical purposes they're a subsidiary of Microsoft, which most definitely has a very large public infrastructure offering.

Sure, but I don't really care about Microsoft and they have nothing to do with the progress we've seen so far

Ok but which recipe tastes good?

Which Netflix shows are good?

At least a Netflix show had someone trying to make it watchable by humans. OpenAI is only putting the content in a blender.

My point is that it determines what is good based on human feedback, and it feeds a recommendation engine.

You really want a recipe where the steps are guessed probabilistically? You'll end up with a turkeycakesoup or something.

I am not so sure.

Check out Bing Chat/Search. It's been doing this for "weeks" now.

Also, GPT "search" is too slow for me right now. I could have had an answer on traditional search by the time the model outputs anything.

> product management for software) is about to be nearly worthless in 5 years

Isn't that one of the few fields in software that should be safe from AI? AI cannot explain to engineers what users want, manage people issues, or negotiate.

It seems pretty awesome at those tasks. Point it at a meeting transcript and have it create user stories. I Don think GPT-4 replaces a person in any professional role I can think of, but it seems all people will find a range of tasks can be automated.

I would backtrack this slightly. If I were to be more clear, I'd say that:

1. The type of software projects I manage are about to be worthless

2. Managing software development (in a project manager way) the way it happens at my employer is also soon going to be a worthless skill (or at least, massively lowered in demand)

I agree that the human understanding component in translating business needs to software will be one of the longer lived job functions.

> Ignore the silly third party plugins, the first party plugins for web browsing and code interpretation are massive game changers.

Sorry what? The base endpoint for these will allow you to do basically everything that OpenAI does with "plugins". Like...what? What is everyone freaking out over? Every one of these plugins has been possible since well before they announced this.

It's text in, text out. You can call any other api you want in to supplement that process. Am I missing something? Please don't quit your job over this.

Regular non-technical folks are very comfortable controlling a chatbot.They are not comfortable building APIs to supplement it.

I dismissed plugins a little too strongly. And as the other person pointed out, it's less about the ability to integrate platforms together, and more about ChatGPT interacting with them directly after a single sentence of prompting.

I was considering doing the same (giving notice) and I'm doing similar things as you (product mgmt). What's your plan "to focus your career on what's happening in this field"?

As a previous startup founder, now marketer, i’m also going in all in on reinventing myself. Can we start a group to support each other through this new phase?

I also quit my job three months ago for the same reason and would gladly join the group!

Me too, three months ago as well!

https://old.reddit.com/r/aishift/

Made a subreddit here that I'll post in if you want to join: https://old.reddit.com/r/aishift/

great stuff! I’m joining, let’s do it

You guys need to take your medication.

Hah I just quit my job a few days ago, for other reasons - mostly wanted to have a sabbatical, but looking at what ML does and its future, its clear to me I need to at least understand how all of those pieces work so I can employ the libs / apis if not build them myself.

This feels kinda like the blockchain rush ~5 years back, but with actual substantial potential rather than the obvious niche application of that tech.

Started watching the videos from Adrej - https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html quite impressed so far.

>No longer do I need to sift through pages of "12 best recipes for Thanksgiving" blog spam - OpenAI will do this for me and compile the results across several blog spam sites.

Why, exactly, will publisher let openai crawl their sites, extract all value, paraphrase their content, with no benefit to the publisher? Publishers let googlebot crawl their sites because they get a benefit. It's easy enough to block bots if they instead deliver crawl costs and steal the content.

And why do you expect no gaming of the ChatGPT algo as people do with the google algo. The whole "write a story on a recipe site thing" is both to game the algo and for copyright reasons.

How sad is this if true, that Google's fortunes are built on spamming people with bullshit, and people are finding a more efficient way to collect bullshit.

> OpenAI will do this for me and compile the results across several blog spam sites.

Using Bing to search for them. That will remain its weak spot.

Frankly Google's search is awful to the point of useless these days too. Unless I'm specifically looking for something on an official website it's only listicles and blog spam that don't answer my question. And 90% of my searches are "site:reddit.com" now too

The Bing search engine is not bad. They even reconstructed the recommendation engine using their Prometheus model to return more content and less spam.

For the first time in over a decade I have changed my phone's default search engine. It is by no means bad.

Where the hell do we even go from here? The logical step seems to be to start studying AI now but even Sam Altman has said that he’s thinking that ML engineers will be the first to get automated. Can’t find source but I think it was one of his interviews on YouTube before chatgpt came out.

In terms of job security, the trades is the first obvious answer that comes to mind for me. It will be a while yet until we have robots that replace plumbing and electrical wiring in your building.

I’ve landed in the same place. Feels like the more your job interacts with people or the physical world, the safer you are. Everything else is going to undergo a massive paradigm shift.

They've already killed nlp researchers in one release. Lol.

Hey 93po, can you please temporarily add your contact details in your bio, I would love to write you and regularly check in on your career pivot! I'm also interested as well!

I appreciate the interest. However I don't really want my spicy and off the cuff commenting on this account to be tied to my real identity, because although my believes are genuine, they are often ones I wouldn't express in person because they're unpopular and ostracizing.

That said, I'll post in this new subreddit anonymously if you want to join and follow: https://old.reddit.com/r/aishift/

Don't quit yet.

Also a product manager at the moment, previously ran an agency for 10 years, wondering what my next step will be.

Feel free to join here: https://old.reddit.com/r/aishift/

Please consider a Discord. I too am leaving my current industry to focus on this tech also.

Edit: Fair!

I'm not a huge discord fan because the conversations are too ephemeral and hard to track and tend to fill with clutter and fluff.

It's extraordinary, openai could probably licence this to Google right now and ask for 25% equity in return

There is absolutely no way that Google would go for that.

Completely agreed. Google is insanely rigid from what I've heard recently.

Google is busy riding the Kodak roller coaster off a cliff. Maybe they'll save themselves, but they're not doing a good job so far.

Hah you made my day, this is such an apt analogy.

> No longer do I need to sift through pages of "12 best recipes for Thanksgiving" blog spam

Advantage that basic Google search still has:

- you can just open the page

- write the query

- scroll past the spam.

ChatGpt workflow is:

- register

- confirm your mail

- and then it asks for phone number...