Almost 20 years ago I was told by top researches in AI that this stuff was years or decades away. Suddenly it's here.

When I was in university I did research in AI. The research was in computer vision. I was tasked with doing image segmentation, which is figuring out what objects are in an image. I had access to top of the line hardware and could run experiments on a cluster, which is a series of high end computers strung together to get more power. Despite all this, I could only get 95% accuracy, and this was on a specific task. I remember having a conversation with a researcher who had a PhD in AI. He basically said this stuff was years or decades away from being useful. <br><br>Now we have ChatGPT, which can do 100s of things including image generation, answering questions and more. It's crazy to see how far this stuff has come in the last 18-20 years.