You've misunderstood what I was talking about; that's a different meaning of the word "problem". Possibly you did not intend to start a merely semantic argument, but that's what you ended up doing, so I am unfortunately going to have to point at the dictionary.

You're talking about definition 1 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/problem, "A difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with," with the examples given being racism, addictions, and lack of access to health care. Those aren't the kind of problems AI can help with.

The kind of "problem" that AI can help with is definition 2, "A question to be answered, schoolwork exercise." That is the character of engineering "problems", although they are more open-ended than schoolwork exercises, because there are many defensible tradeoffs. "How can I build a bridge here?" or "How can I improve the fuel efficiency of this vehicle?" is a "problem" in the sense of a question to be answered with knowledge and effort, not in the sense of being similar to racism or addiction.

If the questions you're thinking of are so easy to answer that they can be easily answered by a hypothetical AI model 1/500th as good as Opus 5.5 — well, think up some harder questions.

Thanks for clarfying.

> well, think up some harder questions.

There's nothing wrong with this mindset, but your insistence that other people must have your values is off-putting.

To wit: at the end of my phd I was offered several tenure-track positions where "work on problems that are hard" would've been a big part of my job.

I turned those offers down due to my distaste with "because it's hard" as a justification for working on problems.

I'm much more interested in helping people and solving (def'n 1) problems. Those problems are almost always too large and messy to one-shot, but very often contain many components that can be solved with non-sota models, and make sense to solve with non-sota models for any number of economic/scaling reasons. E.g.: "can I serve this thing that costs $0.25 per run on even c.2024 sota models to 100,000 K12 students who will use it dozens of times a day on a non-profit's budget of ~$0.00."

P.S. The "problem" definition thing is very confusing to your readers because the person you responded to was clearly using the first definition! It would have been helpful for you to sign-post that you are using the same word as the person you are replying to but changing the meaning out from under your reader.