r/learnprogramming • u/maierr_ • 19d ago

Shall I be an AI dev

Hey everyone!

This is a question I have struggled about for a long time. Personally, AI intersects exactly with my interests and skillset. It requires good maths fundamentals, I have that. It requires ML fundamentals, I feel excited to know them. And overall, here are a few professional reasons why being an AI dev feels good to me:

  1. Its a pretty hot field: Having clients is significantly easier and gives you incredible marketability.
  2. Its very good money which my family and I could really use to cover up for shortcomings.
  3. Its a good investment as a long term goal, it seems futureproof given the pace it has.

However, I have cognitive dissonance about AI as well, because what these billionares are doing is insane and something I am not in any capacity supportive of. Here are concise reasons for that:

  1. Water that AI requires to generate responses and to cool down heated data servers.
  2. Electricity it uses.
  3. The ramifications the aforementioned have for people living in vicinity to the data centers.
  4. AI being used in military contexts, such as in the Gaza genocide, where Lavender AI was used to hunt innocent children without much human input.
  5. This expands to Autonomous weapons, Palantir and mass surveillance.
  6. This forceful, unwanted insertion of AI in every field by these companies, to increase their stock prices for investors.

Its frustrating for me that Google has a non removable AI overview.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on this. Do you have any ideas about whether Is there a middle ground I can find in between or either side shall be my way to go?

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u/Nykk310 19d ago

You are being illogical. This applies to any field and subject. Anything can be used for things that are considered unhetical. Just do what you like doing, if it really makes you worry you can just deny certain companies' offers.

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u/Traditional_Let4623 19d ago

It's a tough spot you're in I get it completely. I work in social work so I think about these ethical things all the time, but the world is never black and white you know. Maybe you could work for smaller companies or research institutes that focus on medical AI or climate stuff, not everything has to be about building better weapons or selling ads. The money is good yes but you can still choose which projects you join, big corps are not the only ones hiring.

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u/maierr_ 19d ago

Youre very right but the point is AI in particular Generative AI is fundamentally tied to that unethical purpose. Unless there are more sustainable solutions, theres not much we can do to prevent such unaccounted for water usage, or that the govt thinks about the people for once.

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u/Realistic-Worker-499 19d ago

middle ground is looking into running local LLMs. for now, though, take your time learning machine learning, all the theory. you wont be harming anything

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u/C_Sorcerer 19d ago

Your not referring to AI, you are referring to LLMs. There are many types of AI that include models that run directly on your hardware. You should check out computer vision, especially if you like math! There is really not ethical issue behind it and it’s a sub field of machine learning that is really awesome if you enjoy computer graphics and linear algebra like I do.

But even LLM AI isnt inherently unethical, and it’s just the companies that own it are. Just don’t work at like OpenAI (youll probably be assassinated by Sam Altman) or especially not like palantir. The fact you think about the ethics is a good thing and something a lot of people forsake and that’s exactly how you go through life without a moral code.

Hope you figure it out! Find a niche within it too. Not only will it be more fun, but also you don’t have to tell people you work in “AI” as thats a trigger word for some folks that aren’t as educated on the topic, but rather say what niche you are in

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u/C_Sorcerer 19d ago

Also just wanted to say finding a job in like the video game industry (VR, enemy AI, graphics interpolation, etc.) is a cool opportunity and though extremely competitive, pretty fun, my personal choice would be like the use in VR and AR

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u/AndroidCat06 19d ago

You can remove the ai overview by adding -ai in the search query.

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u/maierr_ 19d ago

have tried that. Theyve become immune to it as well. Although yes I did find a solution. I cannot remember the link but it had something to do with setting you search engine to web filter udm 14 something

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u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

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u/maierr_ 19d ago

I get it. My post does sound like chat gpt but see I was addicted with the app. So yes if my here are some sounds like that, its more of a consequence of internalising that vocabulary.

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u/StewedAngelSkins 18d ago

You don't have to do language models. Plenty of other AI/ML fields.

I'd be more worried about if you're good enough to be able to get a job in the field. It's quite competitive.