alt Hacker NewsYour analogy makes no sense. VHS spawned the entire home market, which went through multiple quality upgrades well above beta. It would only make sense if in 2025 we were using vhs everywhere and that the current state of the art for LLMs is all there ever is.
I feel like their analogy could have worked if they had pushed a little further into it.
The RNN and LSTM architectures (and Word2Vec, n-grams, etc) yielded language models that never got mass adoption. Like reel to reel. Then the transformer+attention hit the scene and several paths kicked off pretty close to each other. Google was working on Bert/encoder only transformer, maybe you could call that betamax. Doesn’t perfectly fit as in the case of beta it was actually the better tech.
OpenAI ran with the generative pre trained transformer and ML had its VHS? moment. Widespread adoption. Universal awareness within the populace.
Now with Titans (+miras?) are we entering the dvd era? Maybe. Learning context on the fly (memorizing at test time) is so much more efficient, it would be natural to call it a generational shift, but there is so much in the works right now with the promise of taking us further, this all might end up looking like the blip that beta vs vhs was. If current gen OpenAI type approaches somehow own the next 5-10 years then Titans, etc as Betamax starts to really fit - the shittier tech got and kept mass adoption. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but who knows.
Taking the analogy to present - who in the vhs or even earlier dvd days could imagine ubiquitous 4k+ vod? Who could have stood in a blockbuster in 2006 and knew that in less than 20 years all these stores and all these dvds would be a distant memory, completely usurped and transformed? Innovation of home video had a fraction of the capital being thrown at it that AI/ML has being thrown at it today. I would expect transformative generational shifts the likes of reel to cassette to optical to happen in fractions of the time they happened to home video. And beta/vhs type wars to begin and end in near realtime.
The mass adoption and societal transformation at the hands of AI/ML is just beginning. There is so. much. more. to. come. In 2030 we will look back at the state of AI in December 2025 and think “how quaint”, much the same as how we think of a circa 2006 busy Blockbuster.