[cj]

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if OpenAI stayed stealth for another 12 months.

It seems like OpenAI was the catalyst for all of big tech to jump on the LLM bandwagon.

But the speed at which new models have been produced has been so fast that it also makes me think perhaps at least some of these non-OpenAI models would have been developed and released even if OpenAI weren't a catalyst.

(Getting on a tangent, but..) one thing I've never fully understood is why or how LLM's suddenly emerged seemingly all at once. Were the development of the models we have today already well underway in 2022, or are the majority of models created in response to OpenAI popularizing LLM's via ChatGPT?

If the meteoric rise of ChatGPT didn't occur but the technology still existed (but less well known), there would be no "gold rush" type of environment which might have allowed companies more time to get better polished products. Or even purpose built models rather than huge generic ones that do everything and anything.

[Kerb_]

Subreddit Simulator on GPT-2 and AiDungeon have existed for a while, proving the capability of language models. That, combined with further research and the increasing availability of processing power, made the development of LLMs as we know it an inevitably, though the social impact this early is definitely surprising to me.

[pixl97]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

GPT-3 made a number of us really start wondering what was going back on in 2020, but probably due to covid it was missed by a lot of people. Lots of people work working on things like GPT style models with RLHF, but OpenAI was way ahead of the game.

[Der_Einzige]

You just weren't paying attention. ChatGPT shook the world and popularized the LLM, but they were a big deal even before ChatGPT.

[__loam]

The bigger firms were keeping them close to the chest because they are embarrassing.