>Most of the excitement about it has to do with anthropomorphizing a robot that "feels" like an intelligent conversation partner, but it's not
Literally no one I know that's excited about ChatGPT cares even one bit about the conversation aspect. No one I know is excited by the fact that it's a robot to talk to... They are excited by the fact that you can feed it code and errors and it can debug for you or you can give it code and it can write relevant documentation. Or you can give it tabular data and it can make charts and do basic analysis...
If you can't see the utility then maybe you should question your own creativity.
Learn how to use these models is the easiest answer. Prompt Engineering (getting a model to output what you actually want) is going to be something of an art form and I would expect it to be in demand.
"I stabbed this child but luckily during the surgery they needed to survive they found a malignant tumor so really I am benevolent and actually saved their life."
> I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.
How? In today's academic environment you won't survive even a few years without publishable research results.
He already had a PhD so it's not surprising he was able to enter Academia. But outside his books I'm not aware of anyone talking about his Research much.
Jeff Hawkins probably also had a several Hundred Million Dollar payout. That's in a totally different class than a Quant who cashes out at 30 with MAYBE $10M in the bank.
I think you are wildly underestimating the cost of running a world class lab.
Even if you retire with 10M by 30 you aren't going to run a world class research center with that kind of money for very long, or at all. Hell Land, buildings and equipment probably eat most of that right out of the gate. MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center had to shut down when their funding dropped from $28 to $14M per year. So at 10M you could Fund, forget about building, a center 1/3 the size of MIT's for 1 year.
But wasn't the point of the Big Short to show the perspective of people "outside" the mainstream who made big bets against the system/banks? Not surprising then that it didn't really show what was happening in the banks themselves.
Literally no one I know that's excited about ChatGPT cares even one bit about the conversation aspect. No one I know is excited by the fact that it's a robot to talk to... They are excited by the fact that you can feed it code and errors and it can debug for you or you can give it code and it can write relevant documentation. Or you can give it tabular data and it can make charts and do basic analysis...
If you can't see the utility then maybe you should question your own creativity.