> Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's five years ago.
That's very ambiguous. "Most people" don't know most things. If we're talking about people that have been working in the industry though, my understanding is that the concept of our modern day LLMs aren't magical at all. In fact, the idea has been around for quite a while. The breakthroughs in processing power and networking (data) were the hold up. The result definitely feels magical to "most people" though for sure. Right now we're "iterating" right?
I'm not sure anyone really see's a clear path to AGI if what we're actually talking about is the singularity. There are a lot of unknown unknowns right?
AGI is a poorly defined concept because intelligence is a poorly defined concept. Everyone knows what intelligence is... until we attempt to agree on a common definition.
Not sure what history you're suggesting I check? I've been following NLP for decades. Sure, neural nets have been around for many decades. Deep learning in this century. But the explosive success of what LLM's can do now came as a huge surprise. Transformers date to just 2017, and the idea that they would be this successful just with throwing gargantuan amounts of data and processing at them -- this was not a common viewpoint. So I stand by the main point of my original comment, except I did just now edit it to say 10 years ago rather than 5... the point is, it really did seem to come out of nowhere.
That's very ambiguous. "Most people" don't know most things. If we're talking about people that have been working in the industry though, my understanding is that the concept of our modern day LLMs aren't magical at all. In fact, the idea has been around for quite a while. The breakthroughs in processing power and networking (data) were the hold up. The result definitely feels magical to "most people" though for sure. Right now we're "iterating" right?
I'm not sure anyone really see's a clear path to AGI if what we're actually talking about is the singularity. There are a lot of unknown unknowns right?