I remember having that epiphany in 2017, reading the original google transformer press release. I remember thinking “they taught computers to understand!, and someday soon i’ll be able to translate anything into anything.” And not like translating “languages” but translating contexts and concepts.

LLMs really shine when you try and combine two previously untouched things or map one bit of knowledge it a common pattern. Eg “summarize Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein as if it was an episode synopsis of Magic School Bus.” “Now do the same for Dracula.”

I remember my mind racing so much that day. With all the ideas of things it would unlock. And I still managed to under imagine just how many different types of knowledge, and different layers of knowledge and language, they would be able to encode into one compact dataset.