A personal reflection on the rapid evolution of AI over the past three years, from early ChatGPT and GPT-4 quotas to BabyAGI, DALL·E, and voice cloning.
Is it just me or has anyone else experienced the feeling I have recently thinking back on AI. I remember the days of the early ChatGPT page, my first time getting an API key and trying out Open Interpreter, and how GPT-4 was the king at that time. The days of ol’ gpt-3.5-turbo, the original ChatGPT. They also had some other models at the time like text-davinci-003 and such. Oh then before the whole Gemini series Google had Palm-2? Remember Gecko? Never heard more about it although to be fair Google has been doing that already anyway. Releasing open source edge models at that. All the projects at the time using the APIs for projects like BabyAGI attempting agentic actions and failing 99% of the time because the models at the time just weren't capable of it. Don't get me wrong, I was able to accomplish quite a bit with Open Interpreter and 3.5 turbo. But projects like BabyAGI didn't return anything fruitful. Then GPT-4. Oh GPT-4 with the limited quota but (at that time) goated responses. Making sure to save all your difficult prompts for when that quota reset. Setting up accounts through external services that gave GPT-4 messages. So many apps and websites that offered “Get x amount GPT-4 messages free!” signed up to just to get some valuable code. The API only gave you a $5 credit on sign up directly through OpenAI. The first stages of Dall-E 3 was amazing too with the external platform. Microsoft adding it to Bing so you could use it there to generate a bunch of free images until you ran out of daily points. Elevenlabs releasing scarily accurate voice models and even cloning. Then advanced voice with the demo where they show it off as an obvious Her ripoff. The location finding based on images. The photo trends. Then Mythos recently. So, so much. Honestly I'm leaving out a lot but if I included everything we would be here all day. My point is, it's incredible how much has happened. Like I obviously know that is the inherit property of Moore's Law, computers and definitely AI development but still it's astounding to see and experience. Personally when I think back on all this stuff, I literally get this nostalgic feeling like it's been ages… but it's just been 3 years. TL;DR: AI has evolved insanely fast—what feels like a whole era (early ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, GPT-4 limits, BabyAGI, DALL·E, voice cloning, etc.) all happened in just \~3 years, and it already feels nostalgic.
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