I'm intrigued to try a slightly different experiment:
Did LLMs arise because a) humanity created circuits so large and so fast and so easy to use in parallel that only then did it become possible to run an LLM, or b) because sufficient data useful for training was accumulated such that experiments in different neural network arrangements could be done to see what came out?
My hunch is (b) and so I further wonder how far back in time could we have made a usable LLM if we had only known to try? E.g. can you run any sort of LLM on a VAX 11/780?
There was an ai winter for very long time. The math for NNs was already here, but not enough compute/data
I saw a pretty cool project to run an llm on an esp32 device https://github.com/slvDev/esp32-ai