For another view on progress, check out my silly old podcast:

https://deepdreams.stavros.io

The first few episodes were GPT-2, which would diverge eventually and start spouting gibberish, and then Davinci was actually able to follow a story and make sense.

GPT-2 was when I thought "this is special, this has never happened before", and davinci was when I thought "OK, scifi AI is legitimately here".

I stopped making episodes shortly after GPT-3.5 or so, because I realised that the more capable the models became, the less fun and creative their writing was.