I'm seriously jealous of the people getting paid to work on this. Sounds great fun and must be incredibly satisfying to move the state of the art forward like that.
I don't know about that. A lot of the work that should have been very satisfying turned out to be boring as hell, if not toxic, while at the same time, some apparently mundane stuff turned out to be really exciting.
I found the work environment to be more important than the subject when it comes to work satisfaction. If you are working on a world changing subject with a team of assholes, you are going to have a bad time, some people really have a skill for sucking the fun out of everything, and office politics are everywhere, especially on world changing subjects.
On the other hand, you can have a most boring subject, say pushing customer data to a database, and have the time of your life: friendly team, well designed architecture, time for experimentation and sharing of knowledge, etc... I have come to appreciate the beauty of a simple thing that just works. It is so rare, maybe even more rare than scientific breakthroughs.
Now, you can also have an awesome work environment and an awesome subject, it is like hitting the jackpot... and a good reason to be envious.
Awesome work environment for one person can be not ideal for another.
Pretty much all the top AI labs are both intensely competitive and collaborative. They consist of many former IMO and IOI medalists. They don't believe in remote work, either. Even if you work at Google DeepMind, you really need to be in London for this project.
The open-source software projects these companies critically depend on are developed by collaborators who have never met in person, and yet these companies still believe you can only do great work in the office.
I work in this space (pretraining LLMs). It looks fancier than it really is. It does involve wrangling huge ymls and writing regular expressions at scale (ok I am oversimplifying a bit). I should be excited (and grateful) that I get to work on these things but shoddy tooling takes the joy out of work.
Huh. So I tried to look it up just now and I'm not sure if I understand the difference. (To the extent that there is one - apparently one can mean the other, but I imagine they're usually used as follows.)
It looks like "jealous" is more being afraid of losing something you have (most commonly e.g. a spouse's affection) to someone else, whereas "envious" is wanting what someone else has?
No worries. I learned this too a while ago (was also using jealous instead of envious and vice versa myself). From my understanding the use of jealous is when you have something but that is threatened by some external factor, eg a partner, a friend having more fun with somebody else. Envious is when you covet something that you do not have currently but wish to, which is in this case playing with exciting tech.
