At the same time, there have been expectations about many of these that did not meet reality at any point. Much of this is due to physical limitations that are not trivial to be overcome. Internet gets faster and more stable, but the metaverse taking over did not happen partially because many people still get nausea after a bit and no 10x scaling fixed that.

A lot of what you described as "sucked" were not seen as "sucking" at the time. Nobody complained about the phones being slow because nobody expected to use phones the way we do today. The internet was slow and less stable but nobody complained because they expected to stream 4k movies and they could not. This is anachronistic.

The fact that we can see how some things improved in X Y manner does not mean that LLMs will improve the way you think they will. Maybe we invent a different technology that does a better job. After it was not that dial up itself became faster and I don't think there were fanatics saying that dialup technology would give us 1Gbp speeds. The problem with AI is that because scaling up compute has provided breakthroughs, some think that somehow with scaling up compute and some technical tricks we can solve all the current problems. I don't think that anybody can say that we cannot invent a technology that can overcome these, but if LLMs is this technology that can just keep scaling has been under doubt. Last year or so there has been a lot of refinement and broadening of applications, but nothing like a breakthrough.

> but the metaverse taking over did not happen partially because many people still get nausea after a bit and no 10x scaling fixed that.

Has VR really improved 10x? I lost touch after the HTC Vive and heard about Valve Index but I was under the impression that even the best that Apple has on offer is 2x at most.