Having worked in the space on-and-off since my PhD, the pace is not "overwhelming". You just started paying attention to it.
ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are good, but they're incremental gains over what came before, which were incremental gains over what came before that, and so on...this has been happening for a long time now. If you ask me, the "amazing" part of ChatGPT isn't the output, it's the query understanding. The output is still (very pretty) garbage >10% of the time, and that's the danger zone...the Level 4 of autonomous thinking.
At the risk of saying something that makes me look dumb in ten years, this moment feels a lot like the "Level 5 self-driving will make driving obsolete by 2020!" panic we had circa 2015. Lots of investors and tech enthusiasts told me how stupid and shortsighted I was back then, when I said that we hadn't made as much progress as they thought we made, and how steep that remaining curve would be.
ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are good, but they're incremental gains over what came before, which were incremental gains over what came before that, and so on...this has been happening for a long time now. If you ask me, the "amazing" part of ChatGPT isn't the output, it's the query understanding. The output is still (very pretty) garbage >10% of the time, and that's the danger zone...the Level 4 of autonomous thinking.
At the risk of saying something that makes me look dumb in ten years, this moment feels a lot like the "Level 5 self-driving will make driving obsolete by 2020!" panic we had circa 2015. Lots of investors and tech enthusiasts told me how stupid and shortsighted I was back then, when I said that we hadn't made as much progress as they thought we made, and how steep that remaining curve would be.
Newsflash: it's 2023. We still drive.