>People want to have a "large" impact - making company-wide differences, influence large swaths of people. I think the fear is that in the face of a ChatGPT, your little model or little application can only reach a handful of others.

Yes, it's this idea of wanting to make "as large of an impact as possible" that I was starting to chip away at. A lot of people - myself often included - feel dismayed when we think about our work only impacting a tiny corner of the world. It feels like you're "settling for less." But when you finish that thought, it sounds more like "settling for less than what I'm capable of" which has a lot to unpack.

And for the record, I think it's okay to want to make a big splash to satisfy your own ego. I wasn't trying to say that it's immoral. I just think it's important to understand that you're in that position and unpack how you got there. Mindfulness is the way to combat FOMO, as well as all sorts of other negative emotions.

>My solution is that we need to dig a little deeper. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good meaningful life? If your answer to that is that a good life worth living is one where you impact on the order of thousands or millions of humans, then yes we might be shifting away from that possibility. But humans are built for connection, and I think we will need to look inwards and realize that we don't need to influence thousands to experience that connection. You can make a little model or application that affects hundreds. You can write a song just for your friends and family. You can paint a piece of art that just hangs on your wall and gets a single compliment. To me that is already human connection, and is just as meaningful as making a large model that drives the next Google/Meta forward.

Yes yes yes.