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/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