Any expectation that we're going to see mass unemployment, or entire career paths made obsolete, is based on extremely inflated expectations of what LLMs could maybe do in the future.
It has a very similar feeling to the mid-2010s claims that Blockchain would displace bank settlements/SWIFT, completely change the supply chain, and make governments change how land/property ownership was tracked.
Same was true for "deep learning" 4-5 years ago. There's a demand for consulting companies to come out with "future of work" reports about how technology will impact jobs. Everyone knows it's flying-car style futurism and not serious, but the media picks it up as reality. Last cycle, there were all kinds of reports on jobs that deep learning would make obsolete, truck drivers and radiologitst being the flagship cases. This time it's something else. It almost feels comforting to know your job is one of the predicted obsolete ones, because of how wrong these things are.
I’m seeing at least applied NLP positions going up in smoke… research is probably still going to be done, but as far as business is concerned, GPT ate NLP whole and didn’t even spit a single bone out.
That's maybe a bad comparison because blockchain was practically useful to no one whereas chatgpt, copilot, et al are legitimately starting to become useful tools.
It has a very similar feeling to the mid-2010s claims that Blockchain would displace bank settlements/SWIFT, completely change the supply chain, and make governments change how land/property ownership was tracked.