Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"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.</p><p>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.</p><p>To put it another way: In 2019, Quanta reported on a then-groundbreaking NLP system called BERT without once using the phrase “large language model.” A mere five and a half years later, LLMs are everywhere, igniting discovery, disruption and debate in whatever scientific community they touch. But the one they touched first — for better, worse and everything in between — was natural language processing. What did that impact feel like to the people experiencing it firsthand?</p><p>Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours."</p><p><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-field-an-oral-history-20250430/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">quantamagazine.org/when-chatgp</span><span class="invisible">t-broke-an-entire-field-an-oral-history-20250430/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ChatGPT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ChatGPT</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/NLP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NLP</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OralHistory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OralHistory</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/LLMs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LLMs</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Chatbots" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Chatbots</span></a></p>