That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.
That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.
In the case of LLMs I would say that VC funding made the engineering possible. The theoretical breakthroughs were largely made in IBM and Google. OpenAI certainly made some improvements to architecture and training, but ultimately they implemented a refined version of a transformer-based LLM.