Yesterday, I listened to a podcast where the hosts discussed specialization.
“In the etch-a-sketch metaphor there’s these two knobs you can dial…one would be who you help and the other is what you do.”
The context was around entrepreneurs and freelancers and how they market their services. They discussed a 2x2 matrix where you can specialized in who you target and/or what services you offer.
| Help a specific group with everything |
Help a specific group with a specific offering(s) |
| Help everyone with everything |
Help everyone with a specific offering(s) |
The same can be said for genAI. There are models that can do everything. There are models that can do specific things. Both types of models and everything in between can be deployed for a wide or narrow group of users.
Downstream, the same can be said again for those designing prompts for the models. You could try to get really good at prompting, but that is a big ask. You could also focus on a specific type of prompt, or a specific targeted use case where the type of prompt may vary.
Some degree of specialization makes sense, even if it isn’t in the dimension you expect.