11 years ago, NASA marked the 135th and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program. I was in the rainy north of Germany, in undergrad, researching echo state neural networks for handwritten recognition; you can read my thesis if you want to see how far the field has come. I used Matlab, it was painful and definitely not considered cool. Fast forward, and you can’t throw a stone without hitting someone speaking about large language models (LLMs) today. And yet, most resume at speaking instead of reaping the benefits in real life.
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