I think when I saw word2vec I realized that semantic meaning can be encoded in machines just from prediction. So then when seq2seq etc came around I saw that this encoding could be used to make increasingly more convincing imitations of thought and language.

I think what wasnt obvious was when Transformers came around it wasn’t obvious that generating text could get comparable results to thinking. So when Chain of Thought etc came around it was really surprising but ReAct arch made it obvious that some control loops would be the next stage.

I think now working with big multi agent systems with Opus 5.5 its clear once we develop the right mainframe-y sorta infra (virtual filesystems, deeper tool permissions, file locking, agent metrics, etc) there is a clear path emerging to what the future of the industry will look like (imo).