Honestly, I was always one of the skeptics who thought AI was a probably-not-in-our-lifetimes moonshot (imagining that it couldn't be done on existing computer architectures) and that stuff like this article was just a bunch of puffery from people who read too much sci-fi.
But in the end, a lot of it was proven right, even if it wasn't quite in the way we imagined.. A lot of pre-LLM interpretations of AI imagine it as some sudden 0 to 100 breakthrough, like one day someone writes an AGI program in their basement and takes over the world with it. There's shades of that in here too, talking about worries of organizations secretly developing AI capabilities and needing to track public data for patterns to discover it. In the end there was a 'magic program' in the transformer, but it doesn't seem like they really foresaw how the program would be useless on its own, and the 'AI' would come from ingesting as much data as possible, a process that has built incrementally over years and been very much exposed to the public.
But in the end, a lot of it was proven right, even if it wasn't quite in the way we imagined.. A lot of pre-LLM interpretations of AI imagine it as some sudden 0 to 100 breakthrough, like one day someone writes an AGI program in their basement and takes over the world with it. There's shades of that in here too, talking about worries of organizations secretly developing AI capabilities and needing to track public data for patterns to discover it. In the end there was a 'magic program' in the transformer, but it doesn't seem like they really foresaw how the program would be useless on its own, and the 'AI' would come from ingesting as much data as possible, a process that has built incrementally over years and been very much exposed to the public.