alt Hacker NewsThis sounds right to me as well but the point of this thread here is about how amazed one should be that this page was written in 2016. I'd say moderately, because maybe you woke up to AI being a thing this year or the last few, but the ideas obviously go back far and in surprisingly prescient ways. But this is not something unique to these AI labs. Obviously most laypeople will see the press releases and the media announcements as the big milestones and flagposts, but the academic research was inseparable from it. The AI labs obviously took on PhDs who trained in academia and had deep roots from those ideas. The story that some genius Sama invented this back when nobody thought about AI is the same exaggeration as Bill Gates inventing personal computing in his garage out of nowhere.
Honestly, I was always one of the skeptics who thought AI was a probably-not-in-our-lifetimes moonshot (imagining that it couldn't be done on existing computer architectures) and that stuff like this article was just a bunch of puffery from people who read too much sci-fi.
But in the end, a lot of it was proven right, even if it wasn't quite in the way we imagined.. A lot of pre-LLM interpretations of AI imagine it as some sudden 0 to 100 breakthrough, like one day someone writes an AGI program in their basement and takes over the world with it. There's shades of that in here too, talking about worries of organizations secretly developing AI capabilities and needing to track public data for patterns to discover it. In the end there was a 'magic program' in the transformer, but it doesn't seem like they really foresaw how the program would be useless on its own, and the 'AI' would come from ingesting as much data as possible, a process that has built incrementally over years and been very much exposed to the public.