What was the latest actual breakthrough in your field?

A gopher broke through my field last night and ate all my damn strawberries!

God I want this

For me as a programmer it's definitely the advent of LLMs like GPT-4 and the impending AGI.

If you think GPT has taken us meaningfully closure to AGI then I, er, have a drawing of an ape to sell you.
- The top minds in the industry seem to think it's a big step at the very least. It's already proving to be more versatile than we ever expected.
- GPT might not be a step towards AGI, but it proves that even non-general AI can be pretty strong and have a very wide range of applications.
impending AGI
AGI is far from impending.
LLMs are generative models. They've learned a distribution to model conversion, and they allow you to sample from that distribution. They aren't "thinking" about what they say. They haven't crossed the syntax-semantics barrier. There is no "general intelligence".
They just feel impressive because humans are language-centric.
- AGI doesn't have to think, it has to be able to perform any task it's given. The models available today are far more capable than anyone predicted. With plugins available to it (which by the way, no one expected it to be able to use), it can perform tasks other than generation. All the data points towards this capability only getting better. Maybe "impending" was too strong a word, but I stand by the idea that it's coming sooner than we expected.
What is AGI?
- Artificial General Intelligence. Definitions vary, but in general it's an AI system that can perform any task it's given, usually with the caveat of being smarter than humans.

Electrical Engineer. I’d say GaN semiconductors. Much more efficient than traditional semiconductors and enabling pretty big leaps in power electronics.

Enh. The big ones are things like affordable sous vide machines or molecular gastronomy or handheld POS tablets, but the most recent is the realization by restaurant owners that they can just slap a generic percentage charge on bills and menus and raise prices without having to visibly "raise prices". Even if one in ten patrons ask to have it removed, that's still free money.

I think it's scummy as hell but I'm not longer allowed to give my opinion on it to patrons, I have a script I have to use.

I think it's scummy as hell but I'm not longer allowed to give my opinion on it to patrons, I have a script I have to use.
All the greatest thespians improvise and go off-script. ;)

About 8 years ago sensors started getting the ability to be programmed by touchless IR and Bluetooth. This is a lot less work.

Safe torque off became commonplace about the same time and I don't know how I feel about it yet.

Five or so years ago every air damper became rated for DC and AC almost overnight.

Testing controls or getting a soc1 with cuec (complimentary controls) so I know that a company is correctly running its numbers after an audit.

Frauds get caught much sooner now.