The S-Curve

I often wonder where we're at on the S-curve of AI technology. No function curve in the real world is truly exponential; there's always an inflection point where the advances go from being commonplace to being wrought only with great effort. We've seen this all the time in history. Even today, Moore's Law is effectively dead and has been for a while. These days I only get excited about faster storage transfer speeds. Which, when you take a moment to think about, is quite remarkable. In my lifetime, floppy disks(although I also remember the 5 and a quarter disks too) went from high tech storage to miniscule. My phone takes pictures larger than the entire floppy's storage by 3 times and stores it in a chip about the size of my fingernail in less time than it took for the old floppy drive to send the command and spin up the floppy drive to start writing data. What a time to be alive. Sorry, that was a bit of a digression.

Speaking of amazing times to be alive, what a difference a year has made. Ever since people started taking attention seriously("Attention is All You Need", 2017), this field has had its Cambrian Explosion especially since 2022. I took some time off work to study ChatGPT3(and generative AI in general), and the second day off OpenAI released ChatGPT4. Blargh. At that time, I just resigned myself to realizing that even if I spent every waking moment thinking about the advancements, I won't push the field. I've used this time to build a robot platform(for multimodal AIs), which ended up getting selected for a staff creative residency program where I wore many hats(electrical engineering, chemical engineering-ha-, CAD designer, programmer) to try and get my bespoke robot to play my trumpet. I was able to verify the possibility it would work within the week I was given, but integration was the nightmare it usually is. I carefully designed my interfaces and even then I learned so much more about fabricating in the real world versus software.

I know nobody ever reads these things so I'm going to close out so I can publish while it's still today(don't worry, I had an excellent afternoon nap after I actually filled in all the new website template sections), but I did want to thank everyone who has visited(I can see y'all's ghosts in my web interface; keep visiting, it's like Tinkerbell getting more energy by the audience clapping). Some of you very dear and special people to me have seen the website before today; all I can say is, you brave souls. The rest of you will never know how awful it was, only how awful it is now(subject to change later). Anyway, I'm going to make the graphic for this blog entry's featured image and call it a night while it still is.