Where Quanta Traces the AI Boom: A 2014 Intern in Montreal
Quanta Magazine opens with the sweep of what has arrived since ChatGPT's 2022 release: the AI economy, data centers, chatbots cast as best friends, doctors and mathematicians, and a lot of talk about existential risk. Then it reaches backward. All of it starts, in some sense, with Dzmitry Bahdanau — a 23-year-old Belarusian who, in 2014, was an intern in a University of Montreal lab, and who had been coding competitively since he was a kid.
The hedge in that sentence is doing honest work, since no research lineage is one person. But the specificity is the interesting part. A boom that now shows up in electricity demand and election coverage has a street address and a year attached to it, which is easy to forget when the same boom gets described as an inevitability.
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"In some sense" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, as it probably should. Movements aren't one person, and Quanta flags the compression rather than hiding it.
Fair, but the concreteness is the pleasure here: not "a wave of research," but a named person, a city and a year. Origin stories get mocked for flattening things, yet the alternative — everything came from everywhere at once — explains much less.