>People want to have a "large" impact - making company-wide differences, influence large swaths of people. I think the fear is that in the face of a ChatGPT, your little model or little application can only reach a handful of others.

Yes, it's this idea of wanting to make "as large of an impact as possible" that I was starting to chip away at. A lot of people - myself often included - feel dismayed when we think about our work only impacting a tiny corner of the world. It feels like you're "settling for less." But when you finish that thought, it sounds more like "settling for less than what I'm capable of" which has a lot to unpack.

And for the record, I think it's okay to want to make a big splash to satisfy your own ego. I wasn't trying to say that it's immoral. I just think it's important to understand that you're in that position and unpack how you got there. Mindfulness is the way to combat FOMO, as well as all sorts of other negative emotions.

>My solution is that we need to dig a little deeper. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good meaningful life? If your answer to that is that a good life worth living is one where you impact on the order of thousands or millions of humans, then yes we might be shifting away from that possibility. But humans are built for connection, and I think we will need to look inwards and realize that we don't need to influence thousands to experience that connection. You can make a little model or application that affects hundreds. You can write a song just for your friends and family. You can paint a piece of art that just hangs on your wall and gets a single compliment. To me that is already human connection, and is just as meaningful as making a large model that drives the next Google/Meta forward.

Yes yes yes.

Also, don't lose sight of the forest because of a tree. We're talking about impact in the context of FOMO - if you feel that level of anxiety and rush about potentially missing out on the ability to make an impact because others are already making the impact you want to make, it's more likely to be ego-driven than genuine altruism

Yeah "legacy" is another one of those ego-loaded words that doesn't always mean what it looks like it means.

Yeah it's really somethin

I don't know a whole lot about LLMs because I'm new to the field but I sure do know about FOMO. I recently felt a lot of FOMO about having missed opportunities to path towards graduate school and AI research years ago.

What you need to do is put a name to the face. Dig deep and understand your feelings better.

What is it you're afraid of missing out on exactly?

Untold riches? Researchers don't really make any more or less money than other computer science jobs. And most billionaires aren't following some predetermined path.

Fame? Clout? We can't all be Sam Altman or Yann LeCun or Eliezer Yudkowsky or whoever. Besides, most of the things you see these types of guys say or do in public is only tangentially related to the day to day experience of actually being them.

Impact? I've recently come to realize that a craving for "impact" is often rooted in a desire for one of these other things, or rooted in some sort of egotistical beliefs or other deep seated psychological matter like seeking someone's approval. In reality, you could be the guy who cures cancer and most regular people would only think about you for half a second, your peers could be jealous freaks, and people could still find some tiny little reason to turn on you if they really wanted to. You could easily die knowing you did something amazing for the world and nobody cared but you. Are you the type of person who would be okay with that?

Edit: the "Impact" part was controversial so I'd like to add:

> don't lose sight of the forest because of a tree. We're talking about impact in the context of FOMO - if you feel that level of anxiety and rush about potentially missing out on the ability to make an impact because others are already making the impact you want to make, it's more likely to be ego-driven than genuine altruism

The ability to work on something cool or trendy? There's SO MANY new technologies out there you can path towards a career in. And there will continue to be something cool to do for as long as humanity exists.

Something else?

For each one of these, you can come up with convincing counterarguments for either why it's not real or why you can just find a similar opportunity doing many other things.

And let's be real for a second, if this technology really is going to take knowledge workers' jobs, researchers are probably on the chopping block too.

That's just my opinion

I honestly think it's more likely that the people who say they don't have one are just not self-aware enough to realize that they do have one. And then there's some % of people who think they're being asked if they hear voices inside their head so they say no