> Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal
You can't make that assertion when these same people made the LLM revolution happen, by securing the capital and human resources to realise their dream / nightmare
The people who made the LLM revolution happen were by no means exclusively rationalists--but more importantly, lots of people have lots of dreams about the future and even when pursued very, very few of those dreams pan out in anything like this way. LLMs are not what they are because of rationalists' sheer force of will.