There's still good money in being a "smart mercenary" in AI, compensation is competitive in the space. Not everyone making seven figures quickly is not unusual.

There's still good money in being a "smart mercenary" in AI, compensation is competitive in the space. Not everyone making seven figures quickly is not unusual. For the rest of the industry, the capital (Meta's 5 GW data center etc.) and operational ($200/month subscriptions for developer tools) are super troubling; however I can't help but observe that the practical impact on my day-to-day so far (with LLMs for search and programming assistants like LLM autocomplete and Claude) has been majorly positive.