Technology

Even more frustrating when you realize, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, these new “AI” programs and LLMs aren’t really novel in terms of theoretical approach: the real revolution is the amount of computing power and data to throw at them.

This is 100% true. LLMs, neural networks, markov chains, gradient descent, etc. etc. on down the line is nothing particularly new. They've collectively been studied academically for 30+ years. It's only recently that we've been able to throw huge amounts of data, computing capacity, and time to tweak said models to achieve results unthinkable 10-ish years ago.

There have been efficiencies, breakthroughs, tweaks, and changes over this time too, but that's just to be expected. But largely its just sheer raw size/scale that's just been achievable recently.