[chii]

People who say things like "major breakthroughs" often imagine a cliff/steep rise. The reality is that most "breakthroughs" are small, incremental, almost invisible steps in all aspects of the field, and potentially even in fields that are only tangentially related.

Then, one day, they hear about it in the news, because there's now some hype, or some event that makes it newsworthy. This makes it feel like the breakthrough was instantaneous or steep, but in fact has been in the making for decades or even more.

I have no doubt AGI is coming, but it will be gradual and slow. It will be the accumulation of more advances in everything, including hardware, as well as software. It might even include economic changes.

[akasakahakada]

From nothing to ChatGPT opened to the public and billions students' lifes rely on that in the next month, isn't this the biggest step in the tech history?

[namaria]

It's a major societal failure that education has been reduced to turning in coherent enough strings of characters, that's what I've learned in the past year.

[xandrius]

You mean the use of a writing system to share knowledge amongst ourselves?

I find that absolutely wonderful and it worked decently well for me (and possibly you.) Now we have a never seen before technology and society will adapt, that's it. No failure.

[namaria]

> You mean the use of a writing system to share knowledge amongst ourselves?

No. And what's with the "it is so bad yet you used it"? I am very much allowed and required to denounce a system even if I cannot escape it or if I could have somehow profited from it or chosen to use it.

I very much reached the point where I am despite the educational systems I was exposed to. And a system geared towards memorization and regurgitation of data in textual format where pupils can successfully use a chatbot to avoid doing work is certainly failing its goals of educating the youth.

I would point you to the complaints of American teachers about the reading and mathematics levels of students, if only because that is widely accessible. I did not grow up in the US and the school system in my home country is leagues behind the US.

[jknoepfler]

excluding... antibiotics, electricity, refrigeration, the combustion engine, the digital computer...

like even restricted to the domain of strictly computation, I'd say it barely scratches the surface... like even if we ignore computer engineering ("the transistor," "silicon microprocessors", etc.)... foundational tech like "compilers" are more significant.

even restricted to modern applications, GPS is more useful and life-changing.

so, no. It's not the biggest step in tech history.

[cykros]

Billions of students?

Curious about how many kids in India and China are relying on it.

I'll accept the prospect of hundreds of millions, generously.

And "relying on it" is a strong phrase. Using it as a curiosity, sure. The ones relying on it seem to keep ending up in the news because of how, well, unreliable it is.

[smoldesu]

> From nothing to ChatGPT

There were hundreds of competitive, even SOTA LLMs before ChatGPT existed. You're basically just proving the parent comment right in how small of a leap ChatGPT is from t5-flan or BERT.

[asadotzler]

no.