I majored in CogSci at UCSD in the 90's. I've been interested and active in the machine learning world for decades. The LLM boom took me completely and utterly by surprise, continues to do so, and frankly I am most mystified by the folks who downplay it. These giant matrixes are already so far beyond what we thought was (relatively) easily achievable that even if progress stopped tomorrow, we'd have years of work to put in to understand how we got here. Doesn't mean we've hit AGI, but what we already have is truly remarkable.
The funny thing is that 1/3 of people think LLMs are dumb and will never amount to anything. Another third think that it's already too late to prevent the rise of superhuman AGI that will destroy humanity, and are calling for airstrikes on any data center that does not submit to their luddite rules. And the last third use LLMs for writing small pieces of code.
