alt Hacker NewsKind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did something on the Manhattan Project, but he will soon fade back into obscurity. Sometimes people say that it was about Einstein's theory of relativity. The only people who know who folks like Ulam were are physicists. The legions of technicians who made it all come together are totally forgotten. Same with the space program or the first computer or pretty much any engineering marvel.
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Personally I think the ones who will be remembered will be the ones who publish useful methods first, not the ones who succeed commercially.
It'll be Vaswani and the others for the transformer, then maybe Zelikman and those on that paper for thought tokens, then maybe some of the RNN people and word embedding people will be cited as pioneers. Sutskever will definitely be remembered for GPT-1 though, being first to really scale up transformers. But it'll actually be like with flight and a whole mass of people will be remembered, just as we now remember everyone from the Wrights to Bleriot and to Busemann, Prandtl, even Whitcomb.
Well depends on what you value. Achieving/contributing to something impactful first is for many people valuable even if it doesn't come with fame. Historically, this mindframe has been popular especially amongst scientists.