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Notes -
There's no easy reference class to fit this into for comparison.
Did AI start with GPT-2 or GPT-3 in the 'this is pretty impressive and what AI ought to look like in terms of fairly general capabilities'? Then it's three or five years old. Did AI start with Deep Blue or the Dartmouth Workshop or something? Then it's over 20 years old, or in it's 70s. That would fit the industrial-scale timeline you propose.
Or should we compare to digital-era applications? ChatGPT has blown away every internet app in 'speed to reach 100 million users'. 2 months as opposed to 9 months for Tiktok. That would suggest there's a qualitative difference there and even Tiktok is an AI-adjacent sort of thing.
Or do we say it's fundamentally different from everything else because AI is about intelligence as opposed to moving widgets around in the Manhattan Project or Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution itself is a pretty big phase-shift from the Agricultural Revolution, which took thousands of years. Should the 18th century intellectual have predicted industrial development based upon agriculture's extreme slowness? Predicting the future is very hard, things can happen for the first time. I think at the rate things are developping <5 years is quite reasonable. That's the gap from GPT-4 to GPT-2. We live in a digital era of very rapid growth, industrial-era intuitions aren't appropriate. There are graphs showing that the computing investment in these projects doubles in a matter of months. Even 'levelling off' from doubling times of 5.7 months to 9.9 months is like decelerating to a mere 300 km/s. Doubling in under a year is still very rapid growth!
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.05924.pdf
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