This discussion started around 2006-ish, before any of the "actual AI problems that currently exist" were actual problems currently existing, and has its eye on keeping humanity alive for a longer timespan still, because there will be more problems down the road as more discoveries are made.
Today's immediate short-term problems are also important and nobody is denying that. But to some extent, you have to skate where the puck is going to be, not where it is.
What I mean is, no one ever said that git was meant to hold bulk assets and resources directly, and so doing so is painting with a hammer, not an insufficient pain brush.
Yes of course they have a different use case. That is just another way to say the same thing.
Dreams doesn't use gaussian splats as such, but we still learn a lot about how to compress and render a huge number of particles efficiently. (We're not doing half of this on PlayCanvas... yet).
The smartest people I knew in school didn't seem interested in regular web dev jobs (front end/back end), like that was too easy. A lot of them interned at FAANG doing that kind of stuff but didn't return.
The ones I know are now either at quant firms, doing PhDs in stuff like ML, or working but in some other niche area of software (for example graphics or robotics)
I've worked at a FAANG and there are pockets of interesting stuff (mainly the research orgs) but IMO the average SDE job is pretty boring/unsatisfying, its mostly just wiring services/libraries together, shuffling data around, and fiddling with infra/deployments.
The PMs/designers and everyone involved need a big project for all of them to get to the next level.
Otherwise what else would they do if there just isn't a big impact project available to work on? There would be no way to advance in their careers.
The incentive of any individual in an organization is not to please the users of the product, its to make the manager happy and meet the job matrix of the next level.
Those incentives drive the product outcomes and the product mirrors the organization
That it drowns out actual problems that currently exist
Companies can deploy even these intermediary models to influence you