Reposted from something I wrote on Facebook in 2023.

Seven years ago, when AlphaGo first appeared, I was an undergraduate in motion design, and I kept telling my friends who were studying design that much of the work designers do today would end up being replaced by artificial intelligence. Back then I believed this not because I thought AI was an “intelligent” being the way a designer is, but because I figured that a great deal of what designers do could be carried out automatically, without any intelligence at all.

I took it even further. I used to say that since AI would write the scripts, do the editing, and generate the footage too, we’d end up promoting which AI was used instead of the director’s name. I said this every single time I had a drink, so people got pretty sick of it, and most of them thought I was a lunatic. To be fair, they were right.

Seven years on, AI now looks like it really has become an “intelligent” being. The truth is that even now, seven years later, we as a species still can’t clearly define what intelligence is, or what counts as an intelligent act. But one thing is certain: today’s GPT-4 appears to be more “intelligent” than at least half of humanity in certain domains.

I’m not trying to brag that I was right.
(Okay, fine, a little bit. Hehe.)
None of that matters anymore. Whether I was right or wrong, AI is going to advance at breakneck speed, and there seems to be no way to dam this torrent.

Believing the future would flow in that direction, I staked my own life as the investment, studied computer science, studied artificial intelligence, and somewhere along the way ended up in a PhD program.

For better or worse, that gave me a chance to ride the torrent too.
And yet, because it’s so hard to stay at the center of that current, I carry an anxiety that I, too, might get swept away by it.

OpenAI trained GPT on thousands of servers, each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s a scale even the big tech companies here in Korea can’t match. If even corporations are in that position, imagine the research labs. I’m sure there are labs that don’t even have servers.

I feel this frustration, but at the same time there’s a flutter of excitement about what new thing I might be able to attempt at a small scale.
Come to think of it, OpenAI was once a startup too. Of course, if you argue it was a different beast from the very beginning, I have nothing to say to that…

In any case, the world is a strange and dazzling place. I guarantee OpenAI will end up in the history books. So how will we be recorded?
Will any human names appear in the art textbook of the future?