I went down a rabbit hole researching the origins of hypertext and one of the articles I liked the most was "The Memex Revisited" - https://worrydream.com/refs/Bush_1967_-_Memex_Revisited.pdf - it describes today from the late 60's. It describes deep research, LLM memory, personalisation, multimodality, instant recall of information - admittedly it's written in the heavily gendered language and the technology of the 60's and 70's
- The LLM is the information retrieval system.
- ChatGPT/Gemini are the personal machine
- The web is the unstructured non-hierarchical file system.
- Wikipedia is the encyclopedia (obviously)
- Memory in the llm apps are the trails that don't fade.
- Multimodality are the photocells, the microfiche and the tape.
- Reasoning is the identification of compounds and their reactions.
It only took 80 years to get there.