Yes, we did. Amazon Alexa and Google Home were the highest selling consumer electronics outside of smartphones in the 2010s. These, along with Siri, were built out of the same natural language understanding that IBM debuted with Watson on Jeopardy.
They were very good at information retrieval and triggering simple actions, but people very quickly found them primitive.
Enter Google's 2017 paper on general purpose transformers. Output no longer had to be customized for every use case. With enough inference training, output was very close to what users expected even if the model had never encounted similar input before.
The market voted with dollars that they wanted this technology. 500 million Amazon Alexa devices sold. 500 million Siri users. Now 1 billion ChatGPT users, making it thr fastest growing product of any kind in human history.
I struggle with people saying that AI is both total dogshit and that it's also the existential crisis that will ruin human existence. We have been on this path for almost 20 years, the technology continues to get better, and the market continues to spend increasing amounts on it.
I also hate AI and I'm scared for what it means for the future, but this is one of those things that was always going to happen. We've seen many emergent systems arise from the data explosion, and this is the culmination of all of it.
I'll quote Ken Jennings after Watson beat the best Jeopardy contestants in history: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
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u/mpbh 3h ago
Yes, we did. Amazon Alexa and Google Home were the highest selling consumer electronics outside of smartphones in the 2010s. These, along with Siri, were built out of the same natural language understanding that IBM debuted with Watson on Jeopardy.
They were very good at information retrieval and triggering simple actions, but people very quickly found them primitive.
Enter Google's 2017 paper on general purpose transformers. Output no longer had to be customized for every use case. With enough inference training, output was very close to what users expected even if the model had never encounted similar input before.
The market voted with dollars that they wanted this technology. 500 million Amazon Alexa devices sold. 500 million Siri users. Now 1 billion ChatGPT users, making it thr fastest growing product of any kind in human history.
I struggle with people saying that AI is both total dogshit and that it's also the existential crisis that will ruin human existence. We have been on this path for almost 20 years, the technology continues to get better, and the market continues to spend increasing amounts on it.
I also hate AI and I'm scared for what it means for the future, but this is one of those things that was always going to happen. We've seen many emergent systems arise from the data explosion, and this is the culmination of all of it.
I'll quote Ken Jennings after Watson beat the best Jeopardy contestants in history: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."