Comment by sanderjd

I kind of see this the opposite way...

Or rather, I guess I feel like it's a sign of the immaturity of the space that it is still kind of unclear (at least it is to me) how to build useful things without reading all the research papers.

To me, it seems like there is an uncanny valley between "people who are up on all the papers in this reading list" and "people who are just getting a feel for how these LLMs respond and slapping a UI on top".

Maybe it kind of reminds me of the CGI period of the web. The "research papers" side is maybe akin to all the people working on networking protocols and servers necessary to run the web, and the "slap a UI over the llm APIs" is akin to those of us slinging html and perl scripts.

You could make ok stuff that way, without needing to understand anything about TCP. But it still took a little while for a more professionalized layer to mature between those two extremes.

I feel like maybe generative AI is in the early days of that middle layer developing?