It’s not the technology. It’s that everyone can finally use it.
Technically, not much has changed since the 1950s. The key technical innovation is the attention model, which allows for longer context windows in sequence prediction. But the real difference is usability. Before, you’d need to ask a computer science expert to set up a model, train it, and wait a long time for results. Now anyone can type something into ChatGPT and get an immediate answer. We’ve crossed a quality threshold, what I call a minimum quality product rather than minimum viable product. It’s usable for everyone now, and that’s why everybody is talking about it.
— A reality check on AI · The Edge