19 Comments
User's avatar
Suhrab Khan's avatar

Such a fun, nostalgic read! Captures perfectly how far AI has come and how quickly our standards have evolved.

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

Happy you enjoyed it, Suhrab! And yes, the pace of change has been pretty relentless!

Expand full comment
Michael Woudenberg's avatar

Amazing how far we've come.

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

Especially when you consider it was all uphill in the snow!

Expand full comment
Charlie Guo's avatar

Were you around for Google’s deep dream? Everything looked like it was from an acid trip

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

Oh man, the surreal horror. I got into AI images in September 2022, when Stable Diffusion was the new kid on the block. So I managed to skip the DeepDream era. Not that the diffusion era didn't come with its own can of worms.

Expand full comment
Albert Cory's avatar

I wrote about the state of AI back in the late 70s, in "Inventing the Future." Terry Winograd, Seymour Papert.

That was the first AI Winter.

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

So the legends were true. I've heard of them. The Elders. But I didn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it.

Expand full comment
Albert Cory's avatar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4RvYJYOzI

this was impressive back in the day.

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

To be fair, that is pretty impressive, considering it's the late 60s

Expand full comment
Albert Cory's avatar

They didn't have Big Data, for sure. Or GPU's.

Expand full comment
Mark Williams's avatar

Back in my day, my first exposure to AI was, rules based practice, neural networks, artificial intelligence/ reasoning. Well that was in 1990. And so called AI had already been around 30-40 years then. Pace of change and all that. 😉

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

A true veteran among us. 1990s? I didn't even know such years existed! What kind of work were you doing with AI back then?

Expand full comment
Mark Williams's avatar

Sales! Product called “Level 5”. From an American 4gl software company called information builders. Went over to the light not that long after (projects)

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

Just looked it up: https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/as_it_launches_the_object_oriented_level_5_the_boss_is_sceptical_about

Sounds like it must've been pretty fancy at the time!

Expand full comment
Mark Williams's avatar

Well I never understood it. Probably why I didn’t sell many 😂. Not really AI but sort of in that broad field. Lots of change since.

Expand full comment
Mark Williams's avatar

And thanks for the link. Brings back memories.

Expand full comment
Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I got one of those newfangled iPads with the M5 and all the neurals. I was excited to play with Apple Intelligence and was sad at how boring it is. I mean yay I can edit some stuff out of a photo, but that’s so 80’s! AI can take a photo, remove the background, extend it or replace it with anything I want, etcetera. It’s crazy how quickly we normalize magic. When did you write your first WhyTryAI article?

Expand full comment
Daniel Nest's avatar

For real. My first exposure to the current wave of generative AI was Stable Diffusion, and I still remember how special and magical it felt. Nowadays, I can spit out or edit dozens of images a second of almost anything imaginable, and it's like "Meh, pretty standard stuff."

My very first post was in September 2022 about Stable Diffusion: https://www.whytryai.com/p/turn-your-doodles-into-art-with-ai

Expand full comment