[thoughtpeddler]

Thanks dang for compiling this. I suspect the Nov 2018 resurgence was due to Google publishing BERT [0] around that time? The release of OpenAI’s GPT-1 [1] was earlier that year in June, so unlikely that. Of course Jan 2023 needs no explanation… And now in 2026 things are at a fever pitch.

Interesting to trace these 10yr old AI posts from then to the present moment. The other one with a similar vintage would be “Should AI Be Open” [2] from Dec 2015, which is fascinating to juxtapose against the recent public battles.

[0] “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding“: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

[1] “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”: https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...

[2] “Should AI Be Open?” | Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/