I was looking up old AI papers and found a number that blew my mind

I was digging through some old research papers from the early 2010s, just for fun. I found one from 2012 about a big image recognition contest. The winning AI model that year got about 85% of the images right. I remember thinking that was amazing tech back then. Fast forward to now, and the models are over 99% accurate on the same kind of test. It hit me that we went from an AI that got one in seven pictures wrong to one that gets maybe one in a hundred wrong, all in about a decade. I found that old 85% figure on a university archive site, and it just sat with me. It's easy to forget how fast things have moved when you're in the middle of it. What's a piece of old tech or an old stat that makes you stop and think about how far we've come?

2 comments

2 Comments

blair_allen5d ago

I read that the original iPhone in 2007 had 128MB of RAM. My smart light bulb has more memory than that now. It's wild to hold a device that powerful and know it's basically a toy compared to what we carry.

kellygrant5d ago

What gets me is how fast it went from labs to our pockets. That 2012 model needed a huge server rack. Now my phone can run image recognition that's way better, instantly. The hardware shrank as fast as the software got smart.