Generative AI technology is developing almost too quickly

My grandfather lived through an incredible period of technological change. He saw the invention of the automobile, the airplane and the rocket. He lived through the dawn of the atomic age and the mainframe. He didn’t live long enough to see the PC or the impact it would have on my professional life, but he was there for the creation of much of the technology that laid the groundwork for what is happening Today.

I myself have been dealing with this for a long time. I remember working on an early IBM PC. Later, I accessed the Internet in text mode via a 300 baud modem. I remember the early days of the World Wide Web.

My first cell phone was a Motorola brick phone. My first iPhone was 3. In the end, I’ve seen a lot of changes in technology, and I’ve never seen anything like we see in the past months, weeks, and days.

Consider for a moment that ChatGPT 3.5 took the world by storm in December. Last week, while I was on vacation, OpenAI released ChatGPT 4, which OpenAI shamelessly called “state of the art”. This week we saw the announcement of plug-ins for the internet itself and useful tools like Expedia, WolframAlpha and so many others, suddenly accelerating generative AI in new and exciting directions.

All of this is happening at breathtaking speed. It’s like we’re living through an inflection point, much like we saw with the first IBM PC, the Internet, the Web, the iPhone. But this moment of change is happening so quickly that we barely have time to process the final twist before the next iteration flies away.

Like those times we’ve seen with the advent of personal computing, connected computing, and mobile computing, you know something big is happening, but it’s not yet known what’s going to happen. become. Right now, we know there’s an exciting new technology out there that can change the way we interact with computers, but we don’t yet know how it will turn out, any more than we knew how the web or smartphones would transform our lives. in a way that we really couldn’t imagine in the early days.

During a panel last week led by Docker CEO Scott Johnston, Ilan Rabinovich, SVP Product and Community at Datadog, spoke about the similarities between what we see now and the early days of the Internet.