10 reasons why AI capability is exploding in 2023
AI has been widely studied in Universities since the 1980s, and initial concepts were developed even earlier. 2023 saw the convergence of many forces at once. Sam Altman (CEO of ChatGPT) said that the development of ChatGPT 5, which he expects to release in 2024 will make GPT 4 appear "quaint" (his words).
1. Massive data centers of networkable computers
2. Software that let you assemble computing power on the fly to create a super computer for a few minutes of processing, and then release the computing power back into the cloud
3. Low interest rate environment and the stock market
This allowed the tech industry in the United States to expand with almost no cost to borrow money. Speculation in the stock market, boosted their valuation, and increased their ability to make money. This allowed them to create massive data centers.
4. Increases in individual chip processing power: Moore's Law
5. Digitization of petabytes of information
Efforts in previous decades, to digitize books, map data, works of art, etc. created huge libraries of data to train models on.
6. Smart Phones
Smart phones are data-generating machines. It lets people upload images and videos to the Internet and communicate. Phones constantly ping your whereabouts, so the date is constantly being collected on you.
7. GitHub, Facebook and other content aggregators
By making an enormous collection of repositories of code and developer's tools, GitHub enabled a tremendous amount of development and sharing of software. The AI companies, mined this source of data extensively to create tools and also teach LLMs how to write software. Facebook provided a lot of family reunion photos.
8. Faster internet speeds
For less that half of what I was paying for 1meg internet over ISDN 25 years ago, I now have 1 Gig internet to my home: 1000x faster with greater reliability at half the price.
9. Open Source Software and data standards
By using Linux-based operating systems, computers can scale without paying licensing fees for the software. There is an enormous collection of software that is free to use: the Python computer language, and graph databses like Neo4j.
Publicly available standards for computing hardware like category six cables and USB, and computing software standards like JSON and HTTP headers made communications smoother and made data centers on generic hardware possible.
10. Science Fiction Stories that are part of popular culture
The people that are coding software today were raised on Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash, Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, RoboCop, Terminator, Star Trek, Star Wars and many other stories in the last hundred years about artificial intelligence and robots. They are bringing these ideas to life.
The existence of the stories opens the imagination. It also gives people a framework of analogies to use, when considering new ways of computing.
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