Comment by fultonn
9 hours ago
> maybe you need to work on better problems
I have enough real problems in life. I don't need to invent new ones just because a new technology is available.
Many of my problems in life are fully solved far past my satiation point by a 3b model that costs me nothing to run.
Many others are not.
But in either case, when I am acting and living wisely, almost all of my problems exist prior to the existence of technological solutions to those problems.
This is also true for the customers and employers that I care to work with. This has changed in me over time, but I now try my best to avoid inventing new problems. The world has enough big, important problems already.
> This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5.
This is cool but also a good example. I don't need a personalized microkernel just because it's possible to have one.
Maybe I need one and I don't know it, but the problem statement definitely isn't "I have inherent desire for a personalized microkernel".
You've misunderstood what I was talking about; that's a different meaning of the word "problem". Possibly you did not intend to start a merely semantic argument, but that's what you ended up doing, so I am unfortunately going to have to point at the dictionary.
You're talking about definition 1 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/problem, "A difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with," with the examples given being racism, addictions, and lack of access to health care. Those aren't the kind of problems AI can help with.
The kind of "problem" that AI can help with is definition 2, "A question to be answered, schoolwork exercise." That is the character of engineering "problems", although they are more open-ended than schoolwork exercises, because there are many defensible tradeoffs. "How can I build a bridge here?" or "How can I improve the fuel efficiency of this vehicle?" is a "problem" in the sense of a question to be answered with knowledge and effort, not in the sense of being similar to racism or addiction.
If the questions you're thinking of are so easy to answer that they can be easily answered by a hypothetical AI model 1/500th as good as Opus 5.5 — well, think up some harder questions.