I’m in my late fourties’ and have witnessed only a handful of transformative technologies in my time. Nothing in the last 15 years has given me that “tingly feeling” of excitement — you know, that feeling that we’re on the cusp of something transformative — than the recent progress in AI.

While the new AI frontier might be led by prohibitively expensive (and closed) large language models, we’re also seeing great grass-roots progress at a smaller scale with modest models trained by the developer community. I trained a baby GPT the other day using llama2.c for my own use cases.

It’s Linux vs Sun/Unix all over again.