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I thought working in AI would put me ahead of the curve. Two years in, I've never felt more behind and tired of the topic.
Courtesy of Santiago Barraza Lopez
- I'm a lawyer who decided to work in AI to try to get ahead of this technological curve.
- Over the last two years, I've struggled to keep up because AI is advancing faster than I expected.
- I feel overwhelmed and burned out by the constant conversations around AI.
For most of my career, I was a lawyer. There was something reassuring about how expertise worked in law. The longer I practiced, the more I knew.
But after years in a demanding profession, I burned out. It wasn't that I stopped enjoying law. I just needed a change.
Around two years ago, I started shifting my career toward AI because I thought it was the future. I didn't want to wake up 10 years later and realize technology had changed my profession without me.
It seemed like the smartest career move I could make. Now, I'm not so sure.
Joining the AI boom early seemed like the perfect career move
I made the transition while the AI boom was still gaining momentum. Ironically, I landed a job at a legal tech company thanks to a conversation with ChatGPT. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine my experience with my growing interest in tech.
My role involved testing the most advanced models, comparing their capabilities, and exploring how they could be used in legal work. I felt like I was ahead of a major change rather than trying to catch up with it.
I also became the go-to person for anything AI-related among my family and friends. People would ask me which tools to use, whether AI would replace their jobs, or what I thought about the latest developments. I enjoyed being the person who seemed to understand something that everyone was suddenly talking about.
But that feeling didn't last as long as I expected. Slowly, I began to realize that this wasn't just another new technology. It was something evolving at an almost frightening pace. And being close to it didn't necessarily mean being able to keep up with it.
What initially felt like an advantage was gradually becoming a source of pressure.
Things that took me weeks to learn or build became obsolete almost overnight
New frontier AI models and companies seemed to arrive every few weeks, each promising capabilities that the previous lacked. Just as I began understanding one model, another would appear, forcing me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about what AI could and couldn't do. There was barely enough time to breathe before "the next big thing" came.
What frustrated me most was how quickly my own work could lose its value. I spent weeks developing solutions to problems that a newer model could suddenly solve within a few minutes. Things I had carefully learned a couple of months earlier became unnecessary after a single product announcement. It was strange to put so much effort into something only to discover that the technology had already overtaken me.
And the constant learning didn't stop when I finished work. AI was everywhere. It was in the news, on social media, in conversations with friends, and in almost every discussion about the future of work. Sometimes, after spending an entire day testing models, the last thing I wanted to hear about was another breakthrough.
Yet I still felt an obligation to read about it, afraid that missing a single development could leave me even further behind. I was getting tired.
Accepting uncertainty became the only way forward
For years, I had measured my professional progress by how much I knew and how confident I felt about my abilities. AI challenged that completely. I began to question whether being good at my job meant knowing the latest developments or simply knowing how to adapt as everything changed. It was uncomfortable to accept that experience and hard work might not always provide the certainty I was used to.
I also started questioning how much of my personal time I was willing to sacrifice to stay relevant. I didn't want every conversation, evening, or weekend to become another opportunity to learn or talk about AI. I began making a conscious effort to disconnect after work, even if that meant missing an announcement or falling behind on the latest developments. For the first time, I was choosing not to know everything.
I don't regret moving into AI, but I no longer feel as certain about the decision as I once did. The technology isn't going to slow down. All I know for sure is that we are living through one of the most important inflection points in recent history, and perhaps that's what makes it all so overwhelming.
