Researchers Debate the True Starting Point of the Modern AI Era
On October 5–6, Shir Peled and NLP scholar Yoav Goldberg held a history-leaning debate on X (in Hebrew) over when the modern AI era actually began, prompting multiple write-ups.
Confirmed
- Shir Peled noted that AlexNet, published in September 2012, is widely seen as the milestone that kicked off the current AI era; amusingly, the Maya-predicted "apocalypse" that same year never arrived, while the shift that truly changed the world happened quietly.
- Goldberg agreed AlexNet was a turning point, but so was BERT (a later one); he went further, saying that without AlexNet, OpenAI would never have been founded.
- In the debate over the Transformer's scholarly significance, Goldberg responded that the original paper was certainly interesting, but its importance only became clear in hindsight; more precisely, it was the BERT paper that announced a new generation of NLP and made Transformer "cool" and taken seriously by academia.
- He also mentioned that Schmidhuber's paper on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) was what "really started it all," while the BERT paper was merely "cool" when published and only later proved momentous.
- By his own definition, Goldberg considers the true starting point of the current AI era to be the GPT-3 paper; if forced to name a single "responsible person," he would pick Alec Radford over anyone else.
Why it matters
- The discussion traces the technical lineage from LSTM and AlexNet to BERT and GPT-3, showing how a frontline NLP scholar layers his judgment on which node truly ignited modern AI: foundational architectures, vision breakthroughs, NLP applications, and large language models each have their key contributors.
- Goldberg's claim that "without AlexNet there would be no OpenAI" underscores how the 2012 vision-recognition breakthrough laid the groundwork for the entire generative AI industry that followed.
2026-10-06 ~ 2026-10-06 · 6 related posts
Primary sources
- The Mayan Apocalypse Missed 2012, but That September AlexNet Started the AI Era — ShirPeled · 2026-10-05
- 2012's AlexNet, Not Transformers, Marked the True Start of the AI Era — ShirPeled · 2026-10-06
- Yoav Goldberg: The BERT Paper, Not Transformers, Was the True Precursor of Modern NLP — yoavgo · 2026-10-06
- [source] Yoav Goldberg: Schmidhuber's LSTM Paper Started It All, BERT Made Transformers Cool — yoavgo · 2026-10-06
- [source] Researcher Yoav Goldberg: OpenAI wouldn't have been founded without AlexNet — yoavgo · 2026-10-06
- [source] Yoav Goldberg: the current AI era truly began with the GPT-3 paper, and Alec Radford deserves the credit — yoavgo · 2026-10-06