While I agree anyone taking sam Altman at his word is and always was a fool, this opinion piece by a journalism major at a journalism school giving his jaded view of technology is the tired trope that is obsessed with the fact reality in the present is always reality in the present. The fact I drive a car that’s largely - if not entirely - autonomous in highly complex situations, is fueled by electricity alone, using a super computer to play music from an almost complete back catalog of everything released at my voices command, on my way to my final cancer treatment for a cancer that ten years ago was almost always fatal, while above me constellations of satellites cooperate via lasers to provide global high speed wireless internet being deployed by dozens upon dozens of private rocket launches as we prepare the final stretch towards interplanetary spaceships, over which computers can converse in true natural language with clear human voices with natural intonation…. Well. Sorry, I don’t have to listen to Sam Altman to see we live in a magical era of science fiction.
The most laughable part of the article is where they point at the fact that in the past TWO YEARS we haven’t gone from “OMG we’ve achieved near perfect NLP” to “Deep thought tell us the answer to life the universe and everything” as some sort of huge failure is patently absurd. If you took Altman at his word on that one, you probably also scanned your eye ball for fake money. The truth though is that the rate of change in the products his company is making is still breath taking - the text to speech tech in the latest advanced voice release (recognizing it’s not actually text to speech but something profoundly cooler, but that’s lost on journalism majors teaching journalism majors like the author) puts to shame the last 30 years of TTS. This alone would have been enough to have a fairly significant enterprise selling IVR and other software.
When did we go from enthralled by the rate of progress to bored that it’s not fast enough? That what we dream and what we achieve aren’t always 1:1 but that’s still amazing? I get that when we put down the devices and switch off the noise we are still bags of mostly water, our back hurts, we aren’t as popular as we wish we were, our hair is receding, maybe we need invisiline but flossing that tooth every day is easier and cheaper, and all the other shit that makes life much less glamorous than they sold us in the dot com boom, or nanotech, etc, as they call out in the article.
But the dot com boom did succeed. When I started at early Netscape no one used the internet. We spun the stories of the future this article bemoans to our advantage. And it was messier than the stories in the end. But now -everyone- uses the internet for everything. Nanotechnology permeates industry, science, tech, and our every day life. But the thing about amazing tech that sounds so dazzling when it’s new is -it blends into the background- if it truly is that amazingly useful. That’s not a problem with the vision of the future. It’s the fact that the present will never stop being the present and will never feel like some illusory gauzy vision you thought it might be. But you still use dot coms (this journalism major assessment of tech was published on a dot com and we are responding on a dot com) and still live in a world powered by nanotechnology, and AI promised in TWO YEARS is still mind boggling to anyone who is thinking clearly about what the goal posts for NLP and AI were five years ago.