Guy Reams (00:00.899)
This is day 341. Miracles are not spontaneous. I keep wrestling with a myth in my own mind and in the minds of others. It is the idea that a great invention or a great idea appears out of thin air, that delivers sudden progress that solves a problem in a flash. Reality is different. The marvelous invention is almost always the result of a long effort, a steady march through a cluster of small problems,
If you work at a problem domain long enough and stack enough incremental improvements, the final result will look like a miracle to anyone who has just noticed the problem. Large language models and the natural language chat tools that we use today, like OpenAI, ChatGBT, or Anthropic Clot are good examples. A language model and all the data science that supports training it, building the parameters, and learning how to interact with natural language represents decades of work.
not a sudden spark. The same is true of the iPhone. That device emerged from many years of effort by many people. The first release simply arrived at a moment when feasibility, the market, and the internet connectivity finally met at the necessary intersection. Human-made miracles are the culmination of effort by many people over a long period of time. They are not single moments. I once spent time learning how an old watermill worked.
grind wheat into a fine flour. The engineer who built it walked me through the many inventions that came together in the design. Each piece was a marvel of itself. The total system produced the ability to create wheat products at scale for its day. All invention is a culmination and a slow evolution of our species. Our ability to share knowledge through language and other means passing what we learn to the next generation
explains why we have seen such an industrial, technological, and medical renaissance over the last 20 years. As long as humans remain mostly peaceful, stable in our economic structure, and generally good natured and community-centered, we will continue to see exponential improvement across many parts of life for centuries to come. Now bringing this back to the present moment, you are not going to create an innovation in the blink of an eye.
Guy Reams (02:23.938)
It will take considerable effort over an extended period of time and a consistent focus on one problem domain to build anything that approaches amazing, let alone miraculous. You will borrow, use, extend, copy, and mimic. You will stitch together the work of others along the way. Given enough pressure, enough time, and enough effort, the day will come when someone will walk along and say that your invention is miraculous.