alt Hacker NewsCould you clarify your question? AI model training and neural network research has been popular for decades and the starts of the sector trace back to the 70s at least. We've had a model for document information extraction that we trained in (IIRC) 2018. It wasn't buzzy - but none of this stuff is new.
All true what you say. My question is whether (a) AI models drew significant investor attention before GPT3 and (b) whether AI models at the time had any credibility to make the claim of being too powerful and needing control.
Regarding (a): I know that AI funding came and went (i.e., there's no AI winter to speak of if there wasn't a hot summer of funding in the first place) but that funding, to my knowledge, came mostly from government grants, not investors seeking an IPO payday. They were in it for the military superiority (e.g., being able to decrypt Russian comms on the fly without need for a trained translator) which leads us to...
Regarding (b): Way I see it, AI advancements in the 70s and even the 2000s (when I first got into computers) or the big-data boom of the early 2010s (when I got into this industry) could not raise the existential crisis narrative of post-GPT3 companies because they were not generative[1] nor agentic. Post-GPT3 LLMs are the first class of AI agents/algorithms which could've credibly triggered this narrative.
(Not a judgment on whether the HF incident is true or not. Just the fact that we're even discussing this implies "credible trigger".)
Thinking about it, I guess jackb4040 is making a reference to the beginning of TFA but all that claims is that Microsoft invested more into OpenAI after they made similar claims about GPT2 but sorry I don't consider Microsoft as "investors in general"; as a big tech company/monopoly they are actually in the business of making moonshots one way or another in things that advance computing. I'm talking more about VC firms, who are maybe slightly more into investing in a future-profitable unicorn than advancing computing.
Sorry for babbling; I don't have my brevity flag on at the moment, among other human failings. All I'm saying is, at the time of GPT2, OpenAI was still cosplaying as a non-profit so it was hardly in the "general investor market".
[1] I mean, okay, we've had Mark V. Shaney, and No Man's Sky is a handful of years pre-GPT3 but, again, they could not sustain this kind of narrative at scale.