If you remember the launch of IBM Watson in about 2011 it was meant to be this super smart AI entity and they demoed it by taking it on "Jeapordy!" and having it answer the quiz questions. To be fair, for the time that was kindof impressive but (if i remember correctly) attempts to turn Watson into something industries could actually use and pay for didn't really work. Access to it was tightly controlled.
Its interesting to contrast that with OpenAI chatgpt 3.5 which was launched and then immediately available to pretty much anyone and everyone. Would OpenAI have launched it that way if they werent (as they were at that time) trying to be open? (I get they arent really open but they were at least trying to be then). I guess I'm saying if the first chatgpt 3.5 level LLM had been built by someone less open like facebook or MS would the whole thing have gone in a different direction? Chatgpt being available to everyone seemed to set the pattern for everything since. Was this inevitable? Was it the only way these LLMs could have progressed?
I inherited a project two or three years ago which was consuming a Watson API. Obviously I didn't get a key, but I think they were only using it as a speech-to-text API. Really sad, actually.
Its interesting to contrast that with OpenAI chatgpt 3.5 which was launched and then immediately available to pretty much anyone and everyone. Would OpenAI have launched it that way if they werent (as they were at that time) trying to be open? (I get they arent really open but they were at least trying to be then). I guess I'm saying if the first chatgpt 3.5 level LLM had been built by someone less open like facebook or MS would the whole thing have gone in a different direction? Chatgpt being available to everyone seemed to set the pattern for everything since. Was this inevitable? Was it the only way these LLMs could have progressed?