AI Timeline - Part 1
What's going on internet? It's Friday, June 19, 2026. I'm writing this from a MacBook Air purchased in 2010 in some word processor called Tilde v1.1.2, but we'll save that for another blog entry. Well? What is this about then? This, my friends, is about AI.
"But Brandt! ... what about ..."
Yes, I know. We've had LLMs for a long time.
And, however fun playing with an Eliza bot was back in 1999 with friends in a dorm room in college was, this is not the same. Anyways, let's go back in time. Back in time to a magical place. Not too far in the past, and really not that magical. It's now the year 2022 ...
Sometime in magical 2022 (not that magical)
I'm working with two collegues and they are playing with something ...
Co-worker #1: "Tell it to generate a picture of a dog and me flying in an airplane"
Brandt: "... hey guys what are you doing?"
Co-worker #2: "We're messing with stable diffusion"
Brandt: "Ah! I've heard of that!"
Co-worker #1: "Yeah, it runs on my new Mac, let's see how this one turns out"
It turned out. There were many images generated and much laughing. If my crappy memory serves it took about a minute or two to generate an image at that point. Sometimes your hand had six fingers and was contorted. Other times, your eyes melted into your ears. You know, that sort of thing.
Alas my friends, we will now jump-cut to 2023
2023 ("woah" <-- Keanu voice)
Yeah, we're here! 2023! OpenAI, Cursor, Autopilot, oh my! Hah. These are some of the techologies from 2023 that were blowing our minds. Software engineers began having AI generate the next few lines, or function in our IDEs.
"Wait? What? I'm not a coder, WTF does any of that mean?"
Sorry. Yeah. Basically, it was similar to how pretty much anything (now) auto completes the ending of your sentence in a different shade font and you can accept it to move on; accept this was in our code editors.
"You've had AI doing your job since 2023?"
No-no-no. This was nothing. Most of the time the auto complete suggestions were garbage and we didn't accept them. Sometimes, you would write a little comment and the auto complete got better and would suggest a nice piece of code for you. Most of the time, we were hitting escape a lot more to get the suggestions out of our way while writing code.
So, there we were, coders and our little AI buddies; co-existing, solving problems, writing code, "getting in the zone". Our days hadn't changed that much at all. "This AI stuff is exciting" we would say to eachother. We went about our normal lives ...
... stay tuned for Part 2