There were mobile internet, touchscreen, “large” screen, downloadable mobile apps before iPhone. I could listen to music and watch movies on my phone before iPhone. I’m continuously online since 2001. AFAIK it had not a single major feature which didn’t exist before, except its design. It really had a terrific design for its time.

It was a step forward, but it was incremental. Internet was also incremental. In every sense. Just because the general populace didn’t hear about it until then, didn’t mean that it was that “revolutionary”. Yes, they crossed a line which made them useful, something what people want. Sometimes mainly because of marketing. But still incremental.

This whole modern neural network saga started around 2011. Every step was incremental since then. Just because most people didn’t hear about these just in 2022, doesn’t mean that large LLMs were suddenly here from nothing. They still need to improve for example to not make the code quality plummets immediately when programmers start to use it. It was, and will be an incremental process.