This is a thought that has been running through my mind since a couple of days ago:

In 2026...

  • If you are a 50+ years old technologist, you remember waiting for the compiler to compile your program. You wrote the thing (maybe copying it from a magazine?) and ten clicked Compile (from C or Pascal), and waited... After a bit, you've got your executable file, you ran it, and saw the magic.
  • If you are a 40+ years old technologist, you remember waiting for the CD to burn... you setup the songs (or files) you wanted to burn, made sure ALL other applications were closed (you didn't want a buffer underrun right?), then you clicked on the Burn button, and waited... After a bit, you had your shiny new CD, you popped it to your CD player and heard the magic.
  • If you are a 30+ years old technologist, you remember you remember waiting for the MP3 or AVI (or .rm!)  to download. You clicked on the link, chose the saving location,  and waited... Sometimes you used applications like GetRight, you left for the night to sleep, then came back in the morning and saw your download finished. You double clicked on your download, and saw the magic.
  • If you are a 20+ years old technologist, you remember waiting for your Xbox/Playstation game to install. You brought your brand new game, you put it in your console, you press a couple of buttons to install the game, and waited... After a bit, your game was installed, you clicked on Play and saw the magic.
  • Nowadays, for 10+ year old technologists. They open their preferred program code editor with AI, give it instructions on what they want to build, click on "Ask", and wait...

The fascinating thing about this trip down memory lane is that, most of those things that took us minutes and hours at some point, now can be achieved immediately (I can play most Xbox games online without even having a console!). Or they have been replaced by technology that is orders of magnitude faster (flash memory vs CDs).

So, this make me wonder, how would LLMs/AI look like in 10-20 years? What is the equivalent of going form 5KB/s (dial up speed) to 44,000KB/s (the current speed of my internet broadband connection) in LLMs? What will newborns be "waiting on" when they are 10/15s years old?

We live in fascinating times...