Things happen slowly, then all at once. Many people think ChatGPT appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago. In reality it was steadily improving for 8 years. Before then, LLMs were being developed for Word2Vec. Before then, Yoshua Bengio and colleagues proposed the first neural probabilistic language model, and introducing distributed word representations (precursors to embeddings). Before then we had Statistical NLP took hold, with n-gram models, hidden Markov models, and later phrase-based machine translation. Before that we had work on natural language processing (NLP) which began with symbolic AI and rule-based systems (e.g., ELIZA, 1966).

These are all stepping stones, and eventually the technology is mature enough to productise. You would be shocked by how good Tesla FSD is right now. It can easily take you on a cross country trip with almost zero human interactions.