GoKawiilStop for one second and ask yourself a simple question. Where do your words come from?
When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.
Now ask the same question about an LLM. For an LLM, it is exactly the opposite. And I think this one small difference explains almost everything about where we are heading. (Remember this, it will come in handy later.)
We are standing at an inflection point right now. History is full of these points, and every single one pushed the human race forward.
Long back, Homo sapiens learned to speak and think. The real magic was not the sound itself. It was that we could hold abstract ideas in our head, things like law, justice, and philosophy. That is what made us stand out from every other animal. Different groups of humans made different sounds for the same ideas, and we call these sounds languages.
Then we learned to write. Then came ink, paper, and the printing press. Suddenly proximity was not a problem anymore. Something written by a person in India could be read by a person in Europe, and that knowledge travelled without the human travelling. Felt like magic, no?
But we still had real world problems, like logistics. Moving a thing from point A to point B was hard. Still, newspapers, books, and art kept feeding the human brain, and ideas kept coming. In that era, ideas were the gold. Execution was extremely difficult, but a good idea at least gave you a direction to move in.
Then came the computer, a machine that could do maths, and again it felt like magic. But it was slow, noisy, sitting inside an air conditioned room, eating millions of dollars and giving back very little. Does this ring a bell? Hold that thought.
Then people connected computers to share information, and we got the internet. Now information could move almost instantly. The WWW arrived, then social media. At some point someone asked a simple question: why should only big businesses enjoy all of this? Why not normal people like us? And we got the personal computer. (Thank you, Steve Jobs.)
After that came phones with cameras, so now we could talk, listen, and see. Voice, image, video, all together. And quietly, in the background, we were building a giant mountain of data, while computers were getting more and more power efficient.
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