My "I saw this very early" claim deserves some skepticism, but...

Don't y'all remember GPT2? When they published that AI-generated unicorns-in-the-Andes article, my jaw was on the floor. I remember very clearly thinking "oh, history is now divided into the time before this moment and the time after it".

There's been a long series of "oh holy shit this is USEFUL NOW" moments in the last 2 years but none of them compare to that first moment. The day before, I didn't know if real AI was possible. Then one day it was suddenly clear that it was. And if you'd been thinking about AI at all it was obvious that if the technology was at all possible, it was gonna be a really fucking big deal sooner or later.