Listening to Dario Amodei talk about AI as a product on the Hard Fork podcast helped foment some questions that have been following me around. I’m keen to use this post to start exploring these thoughts I’ve had around AI product usability, confidence and the future of AI service providers.

Here’s the quote from Dario that stirred this all up for me:

“I think one area where the models will be good enough is if you’re just trying to use this as a replacement for Google Search or as a quick information retrieval … but I don’t think those are the interesting uses of the model. And I’m actually not sure a lot of the economic value is there.”

I’ve only got two things to do tonight. Write this, and get my bag ready for the office tomorrow. It’s unusual that I head into the office, but a mate’s invited me to give a talk at our internal golang meetup.

It’s nice to look back and realise that I’ve grown close to the dozen engineers that will be there, and have become someone who produces work they find interesting and useful. This is all due to an internship I applied for, and the opportunity I was given to grow in the role. A year ago I hadn’t so much as witnessed a line of go code, let alone developed my dislike for the mascot.

Hello and welcome! I’m Tom, a coffee pedant who makes his cut by working as a software engineer in a developer experience team. I found my interest in software engineering by completing Harvard’s CS50x during the covid-19 lockdowns in Melbourne. My pedantry with coffee comes from a decade of working in specialty cafes in Melbourne such as Sibling.

You can reach me on Linkedin, and you can find evidence of my work on GitHub.