The first 40 months of the AI era

Summary

Here are my accumulated thoughts and ideas about AI since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.40 months of ChatGPT A chat bot that I remember playing with in the early 2010's. Impressive for the time but otherwise useless. OpenAI first launched ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, nearly 40 months ago. I remember trying it at the time and being really impressed, just like everyone else. At first I just talked to it, and I remember being absolutely amazed. I remember what it was like to talk to older chat bots, more primitive programs like Cleverbot. ChatGPT was better, much better. So much so that it was immediately obvious that this was not going to be just another toy for internet nerds, the rest of the world was going to notice.I experimented with asking it to write, to create content. I first asked it to create poems, then Dungeons and Dragons backgrounds and even a whole fantasy world including important characters, kingdoms, and lore. It was very impressive, just for the fact that the output was coherent but its ‘style’ was very boring and overtly inoffensive, which was (and still is) a clear limitation of the technology.I was listening to the Linus Tech Tips WAN Show immediately following the launch and hearing Luke mention that ChatGPT was being prompted to produce fully functional programs. This made me very curious and I wanted to try prompting ChatGPT to test its capabilities. I first asked for simple hello world programs, which it produced perfectly. I was very impressed and continued to play with it, and it didn’t take long for me to realise that this bot could produce genuinely useful code snippets for common and well understood use cases. For simple things it was able to replace my typical research loop, I no longer needed to search on StackOveflow or other discussion forums for these kinds of solutions. A binder of cards using the printed placeholders from my 'vibe coded' app. I remember the first time I vibe-coded a small project. It was an app t...