alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand why this article makes you ask that, can you elaborate? The simple answer to why we didn’t have LLMs in 2005 is that nobody had the requisite ideas that make them work effectively (independent of any agentic harnesses and Schmidhuber notwithstanding) and there wasn’t sufficient clarity in the direction to scale for anyone to build anything at scale (also a requisite for them working well).
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Surely the only problem isn’t the knowledge of how to train and the confidence it would work. Wouldn’t it also have required a 1 or 2 order of magnitude increase in computing power over 2005-era supercomputers to be able to train a modern LLM in a reasonable time (“reasonable” meaning “finish training before GPT-3 comes out in 15 years”)?
We had genetic programming though, and with the right harness you could accomplish impressive results: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2771783.2771796
You could view LLMs as a super-charged mutation function inside a genetic programming harness.