[mg]

Copilot was not around when I wrote the Tweet.

But when Copilot came out, I was indeed ignorant! I remember when a friend showed it to me for the first time. I was like "Yeah, it outputs almost correct boilerplate code for you. But thankfully my coding is so that I don't have to write boilerplate". I didn't expect it to be able to write fully functional tools and understand them well enough to actually write pretty nice code!

Regarding "there isn't anything like that this time." : Quite the opposite! We have not figured out where using larger models and throwing more data at them will level off! This could go on for quite a while. With FSD 12, Tesla is already testing self driving with a single large neural net, without any glue code. I am super curious how that will turn out.

The whole thing is just starting.

[Jensson]

Well, my point is that you perceive progress to be fast since you went from not understanding what existed to later getting in on it. That doesn't mean progress was that fast, it means that you just discovered a new domain.

Trying to extrapolate actual progress is bad in itself, but trying to extrapolate your perceived progress is even worse.

[james-revisoai]

Yeah you have hit the nail on the head here. A lot was predictable with seeing that GPT-2 could reasonably stay within language and generate early coherent structures, that coming at the same time as instructions with the T5 stuff and the widespread use of embeddings from BERT told us this direction was likely, it's just for many people this came to awareness in 2021/22 rather than the 2018-2020 ramp up the field/hobbyists experienced.