It’s kind of interesting that AI opens up a new avenue for intellectual progress where even if you are the prevailing expert in your field and nobody else quite understands what you do, there is still an LLM that can mostly keep up with you and explain, critique, develop, and generally engage with your work. IOW people who are way ahead of their time now has a peer they can talk to.
I'm a research mathematician working in Tao's field. I'm not claiming to be as prolific as he is, not by a long shot -- but other mathematicians do understand, critique, develop, and engage with his work. Indeed, many of his papers are collaborative with a variety of other mathematicians.
Picture him as the star player on a basketball team. He may be the strongest player on the court, but he's still playing the same game as everyone around him.
Yes I’m stretching this a bit, and certainly don’t mean this as a slight on Tao’s peers. That said I’m sure there’s someone out there who fits this description better. I was picturing a modern-day Ramanujan in my mind.
I certainly didn't take it as a slight against myself. Rather, I've met Tao and several other top mathematicians, and I don't imagine any of them would say they fit that description.
Indeed, Tao himself has written criticism of the "cult of genius":
No it’s going to eat all of us soon, right now for some careers and maybe 30-50 years for the rest. Or to put it in another way, we are never going to be replaced by AI, we simply don’t hire anymore.
- the same entity has access to the source of both the library and the main app
- library and main app share the same build tooling
And even if that’s the case, you have the problem of end users accidentally using different versions of the main app and the library and getting unexpected UB.
They probably have some inflexible internal policy where preview needs to be in use for X months before GA. Couple that with the rate of AI progress and voila.
It was pretty clear to me after interacting with the first popular ChatGPT version around end of 2022 that all knowledge jobs will be replaced sooner or later. I don’t think coding is somehow special. What we have right now is an intermediate stage where “taste” still matters, but this won’t last forever.
I also believe that when all knowledge jobs are replaced, something fundamental needs to change in society. Trying to anticipate and prepare for that right now is premature.
If you believe juniors are already not safe, it’s only a question of time before seniors are in the same position. First they came for the socialists, etc etc.
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