“I fed a picture of donald duck to my computer and asked it to identify said duck. I then asked my computer to draw donald duck’s girlfriend in svg format on my shitty decade-old gtx 1080. It ran into an infinite loop since the number of polka dots kept exceeding its context window. So finally I decided to generate a textured 3D mesh from donald duck and it did so within 5 minutes without much error, then I approved for my computer to send it to my 3D printer”
This comment was not something I would have made 10 years ago, nor would have expected 5 years ago, even 3 years ago once LLM quantization techniques stopped being theoretical. Nor did I think it would have been a comment that I would have made 6 months ago. It’s not exactly surprising, except for the fact how quickly I was dragged into it, within the past few months, with my limited resources.
If we split the comment into sentences associated with years that it became believeable:
“… asked my computer to identify said duck”1 – 2021
“… draw donald duck’s girlfriend in svg format” – 2022
“… on my decade-old gtx 1080” – ~2023 - 2024
“… generate a textured 3D mesh from donald duck” – ~2023
“… within 5 minutes” – 2025
Now try saying that to most people in 2000. The utter lack of dependent concepts, makes this sentence so utterly alien it’d be hard to differentiate from gibberish and insanity. So what’s the next 25 years going to look like?
I don’t know. But there is a trend.
I’m gonna call this the “donald duck” effect, and today we are living in donald duck times. So next time you look at your box of 20-year-old 32 bit thinkpads, consider keeping it.
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… in natural language ↩︎