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Notes -
Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.
The White House has remarked on the occasion.
How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where look back and project meaning?
Harambe is definitely a real 'canon event' for a certain generation of people.
All major events after that point have felt very 'unreal' and usually gets twisted to someone's agenda right away.
It is also one of the last times we had a major cultural event that virtually everyone, of every ideology, agreed on the valence of, and didn't turn political. Everyone agreed the death of the gorilla was tragic and likely unneeded, a result of human irresponsibility.
It didn't trigger a gender discourse (although the "dicks out for Harambe" meme got people some errant looks), it wasn't co-opted as a weapon against political opponents, there were no racial undertones, it was just half-sincere meming about a low-level tragedy. I can't off the top of my head think of any recent events like this which weren't immediately converted to culture war fodder.
I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.
The only other event I'd offer as a marker of passing from one epoch to the other, also from 2016, was Alphago beating Lee Sedol. That one actually DID portend a massive sea change, and if I had been a bit smarter/braver/wealthier around that time, I could have made a lot of money placing bets on future AI development.
By comparison, there is no way I know of anyone could have traded on the death of Harambe to make a real profit.
You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.
The obvious investment in response to AlphaGo would have been Google. So, although you'd have lucked into it, 10xing your investment over ten years isn't terrible. Maybe you'd also have seen that a fleet of TPUs were used for training and made the jump from that to Nvidia.
I guess the main learning would have to have been "you can convert massive compute into narrow but superhuman performance" and speculated that it could be successfully extended to human language by AIAYN, published the next year.
Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.
Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.
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