[echelon]

I didn't even read the article and know that the headline is 100% correct.

It's the result of stochastic hill climbing of a vast reservoir of talented people, industry, and science. Each pushing the frontiers year by year, building the infra, building the connective tissue.

We built the collection of requirements that enabled it through human curiosity, random capitalistic process, boredom, etc. It was gaming GPUs for goodness sake that enabled the scale up of the algorithms. You can't get more serendipitous than that. (Perhaps some of the post-WWII/cold war tech even better qualifies for random hill climbing luck. Microwave ovens, MRI machines, etc. etc.)

Machine learning is inevitable in a civilization that has evolved intelligence, industrialization, and computation.

We've passed all the hard steps to this point. Let's see what's next. Hopefully not the great filter.

[hnhg]

How is that different from "Compact Discs weren't invented, they arrived"?

[echelon]

Point to the single inventor of AI. You're going to have trouble.

Maybe you give it to the authors of a few papers, but even then you'll struggle to capture even a fraction of the necessary preconditions.

The successes also rely on observing the failures and the alternative approaches. Do we throw out their credit as well?

The list would be longer than the human genome paper.

[qlm]

Yes and exactly the same thing could be said for the invention of compact discs. You're just describing "history".

[throw310822]

CDs are designed to be exactly in the way they are, and you don't get out of them anything more, or different, than what you put in.

Compute and transformers are a substratum, but the stuff that developed on it through training isn't made according to our design.

[tim333]

I don't have a problem with the headline but the article is kind of bad.

And the headline is vague enough that you could read many meanings into it.

My take would be going back to Turing, he could see AI in the future was likely and the output of a Turing complete system is kind of a mathematical function - we just need the algorithms and hardware to crank through it which he thought we might have 50 years on but it's taken nearer 75.

The "intelligence did not get installed. It condensed" stuff reads like LLM slop.