My controversial take on AI is its actually a better time to take things slow, experiment, study, see what works. Not dump TONS of money and cash and get too distracted. Because nobody (besides big tech) has fully figured out how to make a product that makes a profit. Its not clear users want a chatbot (aside from ChatGPT)... But things could change.
As compute costs and requirements come down LLMs will be ubiquitous everywhere.
I'm curious why you think this is true? My feeling as a broke individual trying to catch up on ml is that there are some simple demos to do. But scaling up requires a lot of compute and storage for an individual. Acquiring datasets and training are cost prohibitive. I'm only able to play around with some really small stuff because by dumb luck a few years ago I bought a gaming laptop with a nvidia gpu in it. The impressive models that are generating the hype are just a different league. Love to hear to how I am wrong though?
Don’t focus on the hype models. Find a niche that you personally like, and do that. If you’re chasing hype you’ll always be skating towards the puck. My original AI interest was to use voice generation to make Dr Kleiner sing about being a modern major general. It went from there, to image gen, to text gen, and kaboom, the whole world blew up. I was the first to show that GPTs can be used for more than just language modeling — in my case, playing chess.
Wacky ideas like that are important to play around with, because they won’t seem so wacky in a year.
For example, Tony Dinh made a macOS GPT wrapper and makes like 40k a month from it, just utilizing OpenAI's APIs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622702
In a gold rush, sell shovels! The ML pipeline has a lot of bottlenecks. Work on one, get useful and novel expertise, and have a massive impact on the industry. Like maybe you could find a way to optimise your GPU usage? Is there a way to package what you feed it more efficiently?
The point not being of competing with OpenAI, but to solve a problem that everyone in the field has.
Most of the world's problems aren't technological, unfortunately for us in tech. There's little it can do against the momentum of capital tearing this globe apart.
A lot of endeavors can work, even if only a little. Find some aspect of it that can, and flip the problem around. Even if the whole thing is mostly bogus, is there a small part that isn’t? Latch onto that.
Or go elsewhere. The wonderful part about AI is that the whole world’s problems are up for grabs. Part of why there’s so much unfounded hype is because of how many real advances have recently become possible. This period in history will never come again.
It’s also a rare time in history that an individual can make lots of progress. Most of us need to be a part of big groups to do anything worthwhile, in most fields. But in this case lone wolves often have the upper hand over established organizations.