it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
What they mean is that the technology seems to be both moving fast, and spreading rapidly. So, likely looking back to the early days of the internet, people expect that anyone who gains a lot of day to day experience will be more successful at any career that will likely rely heavily on LLMs in the future.
This was similar to what a lot of anti-internet we’re told in the early 2000s. People who knew even a trivial amount of HTML could create simple things like a GeoCities page and seem like a wizard to some normal folks.
How true is it? Meh. Not everyone that learned even a decent amount of html in the 90s did anything related to tech on their lives. Right now, that’s more about if you’re training custom LLMs, self-hosting models, etc. Simply using an LLM, all that “prompt engineer” shit from 2 years ago, is already stale and gone. That’s likely what older people sarong “you’ll get left behind” mean. They’re already left behind.
Just tell people you already run your own 40B Ollama model on a Kawasaki jetski and let them figure it out. Good luck!