I have enough real problems in life. I don't need to invent new ones just because a new technology is available.
Many of my problems in life are fully solved far past my satiation point by a 3b model that costs me nothing to run.
Many others are not.
But in either case, when I am acting and living wisely, almost all of my problems exist prior to the existence of technological solutions to those problems.
This is also true for the customers and employers that I care to work with. This has changed in me over time, but I now try my best to avoid inventing new problems. The world has enough big, important problems already.
> This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5.
This is cool but also a good example. I don't need a personalized microkernel just because it's possible to have one.
Maybe I need one and I don't know it, but the problem statement definitely isn't "I have inherent desire for a personalized microkernel".
The kind of "problem" that AI can help with is definition 2, "A question to be answered, schoolwork exercise."
If the questions you're thinking of are so easy to answer that they can be easily answered by a hypothetical AI model 1/500th as good as Opus 5.5 — well, think harder.
But if on the other hand, I mostly use my human intelligence and just need a dumb model to complement my human intelligence at low cost and high speed (say review every commit to catch obvious bugs), I have a much better chance of building an actual moat than you do.
But outside of coding, it’s even more clear that you don’t need frontier intelligence. My customer service agent is very happy with a 100B param Deepseek flash model, thank you!
I’m using subscription models for exactly that, better models catch more subtle bugs, and they catch them faster. It works out far better in terms of work-hours saved.
Also A/ then OAI slashed token pricing by 2x~5x on their latest models