Ironically that was also the past of AI. In 2016 it was all about specialized models (not just training data, everything including architecture and model class/type) for specific tasks and that's the way things had been for a long time.

Are you suggesting that it's an aberration that from ~2019 to ~2026 the AI field has been working on general intelligence (I assume this is what you mean by "achieving benevolent knowledge")?

Personally I think it's remarkable how much a simple transformer model can do when scaled up in size. LLMs are an incredible feat of generalization. I don't see why the trajectory should change back towards specialization now.