[11217mackem]

To what extent it Ilya the brains behind this entire wave?

As in – without him – this LLM craze, as we know it and as it has manifested – would not exist today?

My understanding is that he is at the center of all of it.

NY Mag said that Sam Altman is the Oppenheimer, I think it's Ilya.

[crop_rotation]

The LLM craze would certainly exist without Ilya. Google was doing LLMs much before OpenAI and had so many top tier researchers including Hinton. OpenAI didn't beat Google in pure research, only in product development. And Oppenheimer is known more for his leadership at Los Alamos and not due to his scientific theories, so a comparison to Altman is apt.

[11217mackem]

GPT–2 was the first model that created long-form and coherent text.

The research led to a technology with a simple use case: input / output.

The "product" is a chatbot. input / output.

There is no innovation in interface or product design.

All the magic – all the "product innovation" is in it creating coherent text output.

(OpenAI's UI is not really that great).

All attempts at "product" (as in serving a specific use case tailored to a specific business or commercial workflow) that OpenAI have led to date – i.e. plugins – have been a huge flop.

I am uncertain who is behind assistants interface design to make RAG so easy. It's usability is underpinned by the larger context window of GPT-4T.

All of the magic is in the underlying technology. And I think Ilya's at the core of it. Yes, Attention Is All We Need is the Google paper that invented the transformer.

Ilya also worked at Google and was a key part of the ecosystem, and I imagine had indirect (and most likely very direct) contributions.

He is one of the most cited computer scientists of all time.

Without Ilya, I don't think we'd have the hype right now.

Someone would have come to the same conclusion, I'm sure.