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

All this started in the 70s already. We had the theory for natural language processing, neural networks, reinforced learning etc. But the technolgy was not there. The most powerful computers weren’t capable of running these algorithms in a way that could achieve more than mere expert systems or chess programs. AI research was therefore for some time a niche. But Moores Law was in full effect the whole time, so now we have the computational power to basically scrape the entire internet (also a factor, as the current flood of content just didn’t exist until 10 years ago) and train neural networks with billions of parameters.
It was there the whole time, but just right now several factors and technologies are converging to make it possible (highly powerful computer systems, data mining in a vast internet, easy internet access). And of course there is now an incentive to market it. You could not monetize things like the Deep Dream algorithm, but now that you can get “useful” things from those systems that you can make money from, every investor is of course throwing their resources at it. But the theory has been there for about 50 years.