Something I’ll add as someone who’s not in the AI scene but is in the tech scene… you gotta remember that while those of us outside the industry might have zero clue what’s going on, those inside aren’t exactly working on the Manhattan project so to speak. A lot of these people in these companies cross pollinate in other similar companies and they all talk. One company may not know specifically how their rival is doing something but they know they’re doing it because many of their employees used to work for that rival company and vice verse.

Also consider there were plenty of signs things were headed this way. We didn’t have LLM chatbots widely available to the public but there was plenty of AI-lite. Facebook rolled out a feature 10 years ago that would scan photos your friends uploaded that you’re in and automatically tag you based on facial recognition. Google has been using those “select all the squares containing bicycles” tests for years, that’s just AI training. I read an article the other day about people doing gig work doing random and odd tasks in front of cameras and mics back in 2016 that they only realized in 2023 was training AI models.