[largbae]

Just like every other technological advance, there is a sort of "food chain" that builds on top of these foundational technologies. You didn't have to work in cryptography to play a role in the massive proliferation of online commerce and banking. There were and are many, many conventional tasks and non-PhD-making innovations between cryptography existing and the wonderful low-friction commerce we now enjoy.

Don't know how language translation models work? No problem, use one that someone else made to make a web framework that self-internationalizes to the user's browser default language without the site creator even knowing that language exists!

[alexose]

That's certainly true! I can use my current skillset to help connect users with new tech. And there have been many minor revolutions during the course of my career, many of which have been incorporated into the sort of work I do.

I guess the difference (for me, anyway) is that this change isn't incremental. It's a fundamentally new type of computing-- One that comes with a totally new way of approaching problems. Listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about Software 2.0, for instance, it seems probable that ML has a place in many parts of the stack.

It's possible I'm just projecting my insecurities, here, but my experience has been that changes to computing hardware usually result in changes across the entire industry. And this feels like a pretty meaningful change.