This is truly revolutionary.

I don’t know how many people really appreciate the line we just crossed with image recognition, but this is insane.

For decades, the field of image recognition has been split between the brute-force neural net learning, and algorithmic approaches to object recognition. And the algorithmic approach was by far superior, because it was several orders of magnitude more efficient, and the neural nets weren’t offering anything better results-wise for all their extra processing budget.

But now… Now we see this system that is human-like in it’s ability to recognize all sorts of objects across all kinds of contexts. It’s truly stunning.

Just a decade ago the idea that you could make a system that could recognize a species of bird from a random photo was a monumentally ridiculous task, which would have required staggering amounts of training on a huge database. Now we have a system that can not only do that, but seemingly it can do that for all plants and animals and… Just … Everything?!

My whole life has been peppered with moments where I’ve said “holy shit, we’re living in the future”. The first high-def TV I saw. The first time a computer played a music video. The first time I used Wi-Fi. The first time I had realtime GPS navigation. The first time I used pinch-to-zoom on a touchscreen phone.

… But THIS YEAR… with GPT-3, then GPT-4, elevenlab TTS, whisper … And now THIS…?!

I always knew that we were living in a time of exponential technological growth… but I never understood until now that I was for sure living during the era of the singularity.

My entire life I’ve never been scared of technology. I thought fear of technology was naive and ridiculous. But this. This scares the shit out of me.