Comment by futureshock

Yes I was the exact same. I got curious during the GPT-3 release and went over to AI Dungeon. It was just running GPT-2. Hmm wow interesting. This felt new! Then I subscribed so I could use GPT-3 powered AI Dungeon. My jaw dropped. I was talking to that model for weeks. There was a whole human universe in there. You never knew what you could get it to spit out. There were glimmers that this could be huge. It was wild and untamed and practically useless, but there was a behemoth under that prompt.

I was sure this would eventually turn into something. I naturally wanted to converse with it as a chatbot, though it could only stay on task for a few turns. RL and guardrails would come later but it was clearly the foundational step towards AGI for me. From something I thought I would never see in my lifetime to very real and in front of me.

ChatGPT didn't even really rock my world, everything since that moment has been another baby step. But when you take a look back from 2026 models to 2020 it's astounding how far and how fast we've come.