> I doubt many people at all would have expected even the success of LLMs before Google's attention paper. NLP experienced a huge jump

AI doing fantastically better on AI benchmarks is different from AI greasing the wheels of the economy towards greater productivity. Acemoglu doesn't have much to say about the former (he's an economist, after all) and is focusing on the latter.

It is argued even whether and how personal computing has influenced productivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Suffice to say that even though these technologies might change life to feel radically different -- it remains to be seen how that finally snowballs into overall productivity. Of course, this is also complicated by questions of whether we're measuring productivity correctly.