We are living in such amazing time. From rockets to computer programs, our technological advancements are tackling great problems from poverty to intelligence. We, as a humanity, are solving great problems day by day — so much that at times, a question comes to the mind: are there any small issues we are solving?

In many fields of study from technology to linguistics, small issues are often ignorable, and neglected indeed. To fields of scientific researches, small issues are often considered marginal that had to be from some statistical sampling errors. To fields of technology, small issues stays in the Kanban board over and over that it gets piled up under other mundane issues.

To make matters more so, small issues are getting more likely to be ignored in technology — particularly for the field of artificial intelligence with their newly found golden key of scaling. GPT became a game changer mainly by scaling rather simple Transformer architecture. Similar scaling introduced new era for image and thus video generation. Generalizing the problem and scaling the implementation seems to be the ticket to the ultimate system of all — and so small issues are only hinderance to be solved magically by scaling.

Small issues are mundane issues. They are the issues we hear day by day. They are the issues that is piling up the App Store reviews and Jira feedbacks. They are the complaints our parents give us using our product with their smartphone. Small issues are small — yet, still, they are the user’s concerns. They are the hindrances preventing people to be users. They are the very reason why our perfect solutions fail to “change the world”.

Solving small issues is difficult, particularly as it is difficult to see what exactly are the issues from the first place. Solving small issues also hinders us from building big applications, as designs that are too concrete are often inextensible designs. That is why solving small issues requires such deep thought toward the users — or, the people in this world in general. It is one thing to produce something to them. It is yet another to genuinely solve their problem, finding a place in their lives.

And with this the goal of my career is to solve small great issues. People say to dream big and see the big picture. Well, there are plenty of other geniuses who can do that. If they are busy building rockets bringing humanity across the galaxy, who will make sure the people around me are in that spaceship? If I can at least tell them about the spaceship, with deep understanding of the problems and smart implementation of the solutions, isn’t that life as fascinating as it can get?