I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.

LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years.

Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.

You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big. We've already left humans behind in many ways (but in others we've failed to build LLMs that know how to find the gaps in implementation that humans are leaving out)

Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...

"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"

Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.

I think microprocessors were the biggest thing, until the internet, then the web, open source, system on a chip, virtualization, cloud, ..

When each of those things came in, there was definitely some stumbling but I remember things being less ambiguous about being good than LLMs.

I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.

I would say, the transistor was probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.

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