Stephen Wolfram

It's somehow it managed to get above this threshold where it really is well aligned to what we humans are interested in.

And I think, you know, nobody...

Saw that coming, I think.

Certainly nobody I've talked to and nobody who was involved in that project seems to have known it was coming.

It's just one of these things that is a sort of remarkable threshold.

I mean, when we built Wolfram Alpha, for example, I didn't know it was going to work.

We tried to build something that would have enough knowledge of the world, that it could answer a reasonable set of questions, that we could do good enough natural language understanding that typical things you type in would work.

We didn't know where that threshold was.

I mean, I was not sure that it was the right decade to try and build this, even the right 50 years to try and build it.

You know, and I think that was, it's the same type of thing with ChatGPT, that I don't think anybody could have predicted that, you know, 2022 would be the year that this became possible.

And I mean, it's, you know, it's the same thing for me looking at these large language models.

It's like when, when people were first saying the first few weeks of ChatGPT, it's like, oh yeah, you know, I've seen these large language models.

And then, you know, and then I actually try it and, you know, oh my gosh, it actually works.

And I think it's, but, but, you know, the things and the thing,

I found, I remember one of the first things I tried was write a persuasive essay that a wolf is the bluest kind of animal.

So it writes this thing and it starts talking about these wolves that live on the Tibetan plateau and they're named some Latin name and so on.

And I'm like, really?

I'm starting to look it up on the web and it's like, well, it's actually complete nonsense.

But it's extremely plausible.

I mean, it's plausible enough that I was going and looking up on the web and wondering if there was a wolf that was blue.