I’m not sure it was so much folks “not seeing it coming” with ChatGPT, only that anyone with anything beyond surface-level understanding of ML workloads and data science wouldn’t have thought to attempt to package such an immense, expensive, and potentially powerful product as a “chat bot”, and certainly nobody would have thought it would be a good idea to then heavily market it as some sci-fi notion of “artificial intelligence”, and proceed to gaslight the entire planet with what it might eventually be capable of. Only because, with the exception of Sam Altman, such a person would have been laughed out of a career. The only real surprise with LLMs seems to be that unscrupulous people have managed to raise so much goddamn money lying about its potential, that it’s got a real chance of crashing the global economy once everyone realizes it’s never actually gonna replace any meaningful jobs.