alt Hacker NewsI'm starting to feel like a parrot, but people seem to forget that software engineering is actually a very narrow slice of the white collar pie. You don't need a mega-model which can reason about 100 000 lines of code when you want to create a nice PPT (which consumed literally hours of your life before) to impress your boss. SOTA models will probably be used for frontier research, complex coding tasks, large scale data analysis, etc. And the average Joe shall be able to buy a pre-configured box with a plug-and-play harness and run medium models air-gapped. Or use such models through cloud APIs dirt cheap if privacy is not a concern.
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Creating a nice PPT is actually hard because it requires visual capabilities and so-called "computer use" (really, GUI use) of fiddly proprietary software. The nice thing about the coding case compared to a lot of disparate white-collar work is that it's all plain ASCII text. You can already ask a coding model to create a nice TeX/beamer slideshow (or whatever the Typst-based equivalent is) but whether your boss will be duly impressed by that is anyone's guess.
On the same topic but from a slightly different angle - as SOTA models get more capable, the 'quality' and 'feel' of the experience they provide in each domain is heavily dependent on the reinforcement learning the vendor does for that specific domain. After all, many fields have 100 flavors of "good answers," but the model has to pick one answer.
Benchmarks are not very good at capturing this yet. But it could be the case that DeepSeek v4 Pro is 100% as good as Claude Opus 4.7 at scaffolding a basic Rails app, but absolutely terrible at creating a credible business plan that another businessperson would think is real. That's a made-up example, but you get the point.
The end result will be a lot of people arguing about which model is "better," but "better" depends heavily on the task and how that model was trained to interact with the user for that task. Two users may have very different qualitative experiences using the exact same model, despite the benchmarks.