They were first to market, but I don't think of them as having invented the product.. The emergence of chatbots seems inevitable once the paper in 2017 was authored by several google engineers (titled "Attention is all you need")... it was just a question of exactly who and when. If OpenAI hadn't gone first, someone would have shortly after.

And, in a lot of ways even that google paper's "breakthrough" wasn't so much the tech (neural nets) but the precise adaptation of it that made it highly parallelizable.

And a necessary ingredient was tons of data, and processing power. So this couldn't have happened in a garage operation like the innovators of yore. And the biz models they're all coming up with are all cloud based -- not that I don't see the profit motivation, but so utterly to the exclusion of any offering that could guarantee privacy; all we "know" about chatbot conversation privacy is what each vendor claims at the moment,, which isn't much, wouldn't be verifiable if it was, and could change on a whim tomorrow.

For these reasons, I don't attach much "early innovator" romanticism to the players here.

:) I'm sure he puts on his pedants one leg at a time just like we do.

... and they'll smoke those long pipes while they dwell in their rooms which are slightly underground...

Whoa, we get it! Ads can be soooooo annoying. And speaking of 'lick my balls,' have you heard about The Lick-Ballz Ultimate Relaxation Kit? It’s the perfect way to tell stress and ads to just well, you know, buzz off. With soothing aromatherapy, stress balls (ironically), and a playlist that screams 'don’t bother me,' it’s everything you need to reclaim your peace. And because we really understand your pain, we’re offering a special deal—50% off your first kit if you use the code ‘F***IT’ at checkout! Hurry, reclaim your peace now!

:) What I had in mind was the tune "Mama said knock you out", by LL Cool J.
The very first line of it is "Don't call it a comeback", which came to mind when I read the slashdot title ending in "Don't call it a failure".

Don't call it a failure! I've been here for years
Rocking my subnets, putting v4 in tears
Making the packets rain down like a monsoon
Listen to the router go BOOM!
Explosions, overpowering the limit
128-bit towering throughput in it
Reach the summit, watch the NAT tables plummet
I'm gonna take the stack by storm and I’m just gettin' warm!

It's always this. Neutrons are "the little MBAs" of the subatomic world, and they chew through role after role so quickly that it can be dizzing to trace. Compounding the issue is that most subatomic particles don't take the time to fill out their LinkedIn profiles.

"Oh What A Night" mode will take things all the way to late December back in '63.

I asked chatgpt how long it has been part of culture, and it confidently said it's been 26 wonderful years.

A bit of kindness would not go to waste.

For example, try understanding why the summary mentions "It requires non-algorithmic understanding" a full three times. It's like asking the square root of a million... no one will ever know.

And the price! They must think we're flush with cash.

I keep telling people this, and they keep saying I'm wrong, something about it not being an actual accepted or useful definition of insanity, just a meme that caught on at some point. Their refusal to see the truth is driving me f'ing crazy!

So were Trump and Satan just a summer thing?

I may not have a PhD in thinky stuff, but someone running Windows7 is on outdated software even if their word processor is current.

"Grocery store in the arctic goes out of business. Residents now have two choices: move or live in harsh conditions."