I appreciate the hype, I get it, productivity booster yada yada. I just don't have the energy to keep up with it. I got a Masters and got into ML thinking we had time. My domains were mostly about NLP, even though I never enjoyed it much. For most applications businesses have, GPT4 is sufficient. It can behave as a general purpose classifier and even recommendation engine. It's just too big.

I feel like my options are to try a pivot towards non-generative CV or IoT/Forecasting/tabular data, but even those have mostly been commoditized.

I feel like your only shot of doing interesting work in software is to get into a group working on a foundational problem that's high risk.

Otherwise I think this field is on a slow death march. I don't think we will recover this bubble and achieve a ridiculous job market ever again. Companies are all getting wise to what GPT4 can do, and GPT5 is coming within the year.

Honestly progress is great, but humans are getting left behind. That's fine I guess, I just want to be able to plan for it and adjust.

Is anyone else just done?