For those who know me, it’s no secret that I try to do a little bit of everything. I consider myself a generalist, and I’m not deeply good at anything — my knowledge is quite shallow and spans many fields.

But you know what else also has quite a shallow base of knowledge, and spans quite a bit of everything? LLM’s! The world feels like it heavily rewards people who specialize, and I’m wondering where LLM’s leaves me, and other generalists. Given the rapid development of AI tools, is it possible my skillset will be near-useless five years in the future?

I write this as someone with no real satisfying answer. I just wanted to bring up the question: Where does the development of AI leave generalists? Do we have any value?

One of the often touted benefits of having a generalist or interdisciplinary education is that one can bring up new and interesting connections that others would not have thought of. I’ve thought of that as one of my strengths, and possibly also a weakness of modern day LLMs. They just aren’t very good at making these logical leaps and connections. I wonder if that’s a place where I and others can bring value.