[blululu]

Kind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did something on the Manhattan Project, but he will soon fade back into obscurity. Sometimes people say that it was about Einstein's theory of relativity. The only people who know who folks like Ulam were are physicists. The legions of technicians who made it all come together are totally forgotten. Same with the space program or the first computer or pretty much any engineering marvel.

[cdrini]

Well depends on what you value. Achieving/contributing to something impactful first is for many people valuable even if it doesn't come with fame. Historically, this mindframe has been popular especially amongst scientists.

[impossiblefork]

Personally I think the ones who will be remembered will be the ones who publish useful methods first, not the ones who succeed commercially.

It'll be Vaswani and the others for the transformer, then maybe Zelikman and those on that paper for thought tokens, then maybe some of the RNN people and word embedding people will be cited as pioneers. Sutskever will definitely be remembered for GPT-1 though, being first to really scale up transformers. But it'll actually be like with flight and a whole mass of people will be remembered, just as we now remember everyone from the Wrights to Bleriot and to Busemann, Prandtl, even Whitcomb.

[darth_aardvark]

Is "we" the particular set of scientists who know those last four people? Surely you realize they're nowhere near as famous as the Wright brothers, right? This is giving strong https://xkcd.com/2501/ feelings.

[impossiblefork]

Yes, that is indeed the 'we', but I think more people are knowledgeable than is obvious.

I'm not an aerodynamicist, and I know about those guys, so they can't be infinitely obscure. I imagine every French person knows about Bleriot at least.

[decimalenough]

I'm an avgeek with a MSc in engineering. I vaguely recall the name Bleriot from physics, although I have no clue what he actually did. I have never even heard the names Busemann, Prandtl, or Whitcomb.

[impossiblefork]

I find this super surprising, because even I who don't do aerodynamics I still know about thes guys.

Bleriot was a french aviation pioneer and not a physicist. He built the first monoplane. Busemann was an aerodynamicist who invented wing sweep and also did important work on supersonic flight. Prandtl is known for research on lift distribution over wings, wingtip vortices, induced drag and he basically invented much of the theory about wings. Whitcomb gave his name to the Whitcomb area rule, although Otto Frenzl had come up with it earlier during WWII.

[Scarblac]

What is wing sweep, what is induced drag, what is the area rule?