Eli5: How did we go from zero ai, to one company with an ai that holds a conversation, and then seemingly immediately on to multiple companies with ai that makes music, photos, and movies in such a short period of time?

Question

For real. One day there’s nothing. Then chat gpt shows up. And then the next day ai can create ANYTHING and there are a whole bunch of companies with software.

In: Technology

Answer 1

There was not nothing, the entire AI tech tree has had a gradual decades long buildup. Its just that Transformer based Large Language Models and Diffusion models for image generation (which include a sizeable language Transformer of their own) are the applications that finally made the headlines, caught the public attention and blew the minds of people unfamiliar with the tech.