I have to admit, of the four, Karpathy and Sutskever were the two I was most impressed with. I hope he goes on to do something great.
When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.
By the 90s they were still mainly used as fancy typewriters by “normal” people (my parents, school, etc) although the ridiculous potential was clear from day one.
It just took a looong time to go from pong to ping and then to living online. I’m still convinced even this stage is temporary and only a milestone on the way to bigger and better things. Computing and computational thought still has to percolate into all corners of society.
Again not saying “LLM’s” are the same, but AI in general will probably walk a similar path. It just takes a long time, think decades, not years.
Edit: wanted to mention The Mother of All Demos by Engelbart (1968), which to me looks like it captures all essential aspects of what distributed online computing can do. In a “low resolution”, of course.
(And, irrelevant, but my parents were in fact both posting to Usenet in 1983.)