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When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine

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Asking scientists to identify a paradigm shift, especially in real time, can be tricky. After all, truly ground-shifting updates in knowledge may take decades to unfold. But you don’t necessarily have to invoke the P-word to acknowledge that one field in particular — natural language processing, or NLP — has changed. A lot. The goal of natural language processing is right there on the tin: making the unruliness of human language (the “natural” part) tractable by computers (the “processing” part). A blend of engineering and science that dates back to the 1940s, NLP gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. It was also ground zero for the emergence of large language models — a technology that NLP helped to invent but whose explosive growth and transformative power still managed to take many people in the field entirely by surprise. To put it another way: In 2019, Quanta reported on a then-groundbreaking NLP system called BERT

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Home When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History Read Later Share Copied! Comments Read Later Read Later Previous: Science in the Age of AI What the Most Essential Terms in AI Really Mean Next: Science in the Age of AI How Can AI ID a Cat? An Illustrated Guide. SERIES natural language processing When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History By John Pavlus April 30, 2025 Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer. Read Later James O’Brien for Quanta Magaz

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