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Comment by Temporary_31337 | Hacker News Reader

This, just like many other takes, confirms that there will be a short term boom in applying AI to everything. If you are in your 30s or 40s and surf this wave correctly, this may very well be the last job you will ever do. So my plan is to learn how to plug GPT to excel, databases etc and provide AI for the smaller companies that can’t integrate AI like Salesforce and big companies like Azure Professional Services will not find them profitable enough to deal with.

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This is a good strategy.

In the early days of widespread internet connectivity (dial-up) it generally went two ways:

1) You lived in a big city and AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy/etc was a local call. Practically everyone had it.

2) You lived "somewhere else" and some random guy you could pay had a T1 and a bunch of modems in a garage (this was me).

Eventually it became worth it and technology advanced enough (with demand) for cable cos to deploy cable modems. At first only in dense metro areas, then slowly out to more rural areas.

Point is - there's a TON of opportunity for "guy with a T1 and modems in a garage" in this space. There is a huge market of ignored and underserved businesses/customers/applications/integrations/etc that (like AOL/Cable Cos) the big AI guys don't care about (yet).

Right now seems like the right time to be doing this for sure. There are also a lot of potential applications for GPT to be used to solve problems that were previously too expensive or infeasible to be done by humans at scale. It definitely doesn't hurt for you to hedge your bets and try to learn how the tech works at the bare minimum.

What do you mean by last job? As in making money off of this wave by lucrative contract gigs or an acquisition?

Even if all the jobs creating CRUD apps are automated away, there will probably still be an interest in automating them even faster. LLMs are currently the state of the art technique for doing so, hence there will be a continual need for more AI engineers/researchers.

And if something that performs better than current LLMs comes around, all those engineers will shift over to whatever field develops them.

As in there won’t be any more jobs for you to do…

I'd see it as a last job. In terms of you can do it for 20 years and then retire. Not as jobs won't exist anymore.

20 years is a long time in an industry with an incredible rate of change. Though I guess if you're in the market now, you're 3-5 years ahead of kids coming through tertiary studies specialising in AI.

I hear many other tech professionals doing more or less the same. Shame you don't have any contact information in your bio, I would love to have a chat.

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