Read real books. Talk to real people. Do real things.

You can catch up when everyone else actually gets somewhere, and have spent the whole meanwhile on self exploration.

Whatever your job is will dictate if, or how much, you may care. How things shake out at the end of the day will likely look much different than they do right now.

If you’re not someone who likes to try and ride hype waves with various get rich quick schemes, and not in the space, I wouldn’t worry about it. Sit back with your popcorn and watch these people fight for a few years and let the bubble pop. Then we’ll see who is left and what it’s actually good for. You can then adjust from there if needed.

But I don't think you need to stress, there is a lot of hype and there will be time to learn how to use the winners later.

Download ollama and mess with a model locally, implement your own RAG system so you get a feel for what that entails and what good and bad use cases look like. I use LLMs every day for random stuff, but not really because I need the output, more because I need to know and understand where it's strengths and weaknesses are.

You're not trying to become an overnight expert here. Nobody expects that. But there's this gap right now between what stakeholders think AI can do (basically everything) and what it actually can do. And guess who needs to bridge that gap?

As a software engineer part of your responsibility is to advise non-software engineers on what is just now possible with technology, because when a stakeholder comes to you with some wacky idea, you need to be able to judge it and decide on the investment of time the idea might require, or if it's even possible today/now.