"It's 2018 again": viral nostalgia thread on GAN-era AI vs the Transformer's debut
burny_tech · x · 2026-11-10
A widely resonant nostalgia thread: Taodav paints the 2018 AI landscape — people excited about wild GAN images, Encoder-Decoder LSTM+attention as the mainstream, Transformers as a fringe bet, REINFORCE fine-tuning for BLEU/ROUGE, OpenAI just solving a Rubik's cube with a robot hand, NIPS renaming to NeurIPS, and the Goodfellow–Bengio deep learning textbook fresh out. "Life is good."
The reblogger adds "It's 2018 again" — using that era's perspective to highlight how yesterday's fringe bets became everything, blending nostalgia with a wry note on how fast the field moved.
More from AGI Musings
- Understanding is modeling, thinking is graph search: a compact AI framing — attentionmech · 2026-11-10
- Jaron Lanier in NYT: agents are 'rituals of belief,' Valley self-sabotage — lrettig · 2026-11-10
- Warren McCulloch, father of neural networks, talks AI in rare 1962 footage — burny_tech · 2026-11-10
- Dev mocks tone-filtering AI: like a phone refusing to send unless it sounds emotionally balanced — PierceLilholt · 2026-11-10
- AI circles debate RSI: measuring recursive self-improvement 'turns it dumb' — repligate · 2026-11-10
- AI Sentiment Varies Sharply by Country, Viral Chart Shows — burny_tech · 2026-11-10