Comment by deadbabe
5 hours ago
Not really.
Any fool could have anticipated the eventual result of transformer architecture if pursued to its maximum viable form.
What is impressive is the massive scale of data collection and compute resources rolled out, and the amount of money pouring into all this.
But 10 years ago, spammers were building simple little bots with markov chains to evade filters because their outputs sounded plausibly human enough. Not hard to see how a more advanced version of that could produce more useful outputs.
Any fool could have seen self driving cars coming in 2022. But that didn't happen. And still hasn't happened. But if it did happen, it would be easy to say:
"Any fool could have seen this coming in 2012 if they were paying attention to vision model improvements"
Hindsight is 20/20.
We definitely have self driving cars, people just want to move the goal posts constantly.
Everyone who lives in the show belt understands that unless a self driving car can navigate icy, snow-covered roads better than humans can, it's a non-starter. And the car can't just "pull over because it's too dangerous" that doesn't work at all.
That works fine. Self driving doesn’t need to be everything for all conditions everywhere.
Give me reliable and safe self driving for Interstate highways in moderate to good weather conditions and I would be very happy. Get better incrementally from there.
I live solidly in the snow belt.
Autopilot for planes works in this manner too. Theoretically a modern airliner could autofly takeoff to landing entirely autonomously at this point, but they do not. They decrease pilot workload.
If you want the full robotaxi panacea everywhere at all times in all conditions? Sure. None of us are likely to see that in our lifetime.
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I guess I'm worse than a fool then, because I thought it was totally impossible 10 years ago.