Not really.

Any fool could have anticipated the eventual result of transformer architecture if pursued to its maximum viable form.

What is impressive is the massive scale of data collection and compute resources rolled out, and the amount of money pouring into all this.

But 10 years ago, spammers were building simple little bots with markov chains to evade filters because their outputs sounded plausibly human enough. Not hard to see how a more advanced version of that could produce more useful outputs.

Any fool could have seen self driving cars coming in 2022. But that didn't happen. And still hasn't happened. But if it did happen, it would be easy to say

"Any fool could have seen this coming in 2012 if they were paying attention to vision model improvements"

Hindsight is 20/20.

I guess I'm worse than a fool then, because I thought it was totally impossible 10 years ago.