Moondrop Displacement
If you live in a first-world country with a sizable knowledge work sector, you might find it hard to escape the subject of AI. That’s probably an understatement. We are saturated with talk of artificial intelligence and, in particular, large language models. The economist Edgar R. Fiedler is quoted as saying, "He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass,” but that hasn’t stopped the proliferation of prognostication about the future of AI.
Matt Shumar posts his take as an insider working with AI on the Xitter site. He issues a clarion call to those who may not be as close as he is to what is happening in the industry.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
Shumar is adamant that what he is saying applies to the newest, freshest pro-grade AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic and consistently warns that if you’ve tried previous models and found them lacking, you would be surprised at the capabilities of what has come into existence only very recently. Though he comes from a tech background and most of what he says applies to software development, he extrapolates his experiences to other industries, such as law and medicine.1