I'm currently in highschool and up until recently my plan was to become a software engineer and eventually start a startup. Over the last several years I've spent a lot of time programming for fun in my spare time and in my opinion I've gotten pretty good. I've built some pretty fun and cool things like chess engines, video games, 3d renderers from scratch and competed in my national computing contest with a solid placement. However as I've watched more and more generative ML models pop up seemingly every month for the past year or two my future feels more uncertain. It seems like a large portion of jobs will be wiped out sooner than many people expected, much like how alpha go achieved super human performance in the game of go nearly a decade before most people expected. I'm not even 100% set on tech as my career but I can see these models outperforming humans in nearly any career. ChatGPT already writes better essays than I do and stable diffusion generates better drawings than I do. What's next? Creating better lesson plans in school? Coming up with more convincing arguments in court? AI programming is not quite as good as I am yet but it's definitely on the horizon. Right now it feels like the only two viable options are to leverage these new technologies for business or to become one of the researchers creating these large models.
Tldr: what would you do if you were an ambitious teenager interested in tech entering a world soon to be dominated by large language models and other generative machine learning algorithms?