As we know, there are many accidental discoveries in science. Penicillin was discovered accidently when Alexander Fleming noticed an inhibition zone where there were no microbes on an agar agar plate, since something carried by wind had fallen over it. Even Microwave oven is an accidental discovery. Modern LLMs or large language models might fall in the same territory.

OpenAI employee who built GPT-1, the version of ChatGPT, did not quite understand how it worked and why it worked. But he was impressed by the results. Later, teams worked on GPT-1, and made it bigger and better.

Finally, GPT-3 was released as ChatGPT in November 2022. This event triggered an AI revolution. This is a common thing in the history of technology. The initial lack of understanding did not deter the team to work on it. The empirical approach paved the way for further scientific enquiry. Its genesis is in empirical result first.

Sometimes the technological progress is haphazard. It can emerge out of ‘messing around’.

An environment of experimentation and embracing unexpected results must be fostered. The initial success could be based on observation but later the focus shifts to scaling laws and scientific investigation. It is an iterative process. It is a crucial lesson for future. There should be both intuitive experimentation and rigorous scientific analysis to drive tectological breakthroughs.