Ed Elson

And I mean, I think people generally recognize him and his name, maybe if you're into tech, but perhaps they don't if you're not super plugged into what's happening in AI.

So what was his role in the story of AI and what did you learn from him?

So when we look through the history books written about AI, I mean, AI is having its moment right now.

What changed?

I mean, AI had been worked on and neural nets had been, people had been working on this stuff for decades.

Jeff Hinton had been working on it for decades.

He makes this breakthrough with image recognition in the early 2010s.

Now it's ubiquitous.

Was ChatGPT the breakthrough moment?

Like, what will the textbooks tell us about what changed when AI became mainstream?

There have been other AI moments.

Yeah, it's interesting that in a way it was the consumerization that really took things in a completely different direction, which is almost a testament, not necessarily to the underlying technology, but almost to like the productization and being able to put these kinds of technology into the hands of millions and then eventually hundreds of millions of people.

Is that when you see all of these big tech companies that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building out their AI capabilities, building out data centers, renting compute, buying chips, and then spending money on models like the ones you've built to build their own products.

Do you think it was sort of a moment where they kind of woke up

to what the capabilities and what the prospects of AI could be because they just saw it a lot?

Or was it something else?

Was it that the technology changed a fundamental way?

I mean, to what extent was this sort of the narrative

that suddenly captured people's imaginations versus something in the technology actually changed, which made Mark Zuckerberg think, now we need to get on this.

Yeah.