> Investors have rewarded every story of "our models are too powerful to be controlled" since before ChatGPT.

Can you elaborate/refresh my memory? IIRC before ChatGPT 3 there wasn't really an investor market for AI models, rather crypto. I remember playing with the likes of Stable Diffusion pre-ChatGPT 3 but only the likes of Altman and Musk were talking about AI too powerful to be controlled (which is notably the rationale of OpenAI's original charter); still investors in general were hardly invested at the time.

Could you clarify your question? AI model training and neural network research has been popular for decades and the starts of the sector trace back to the 70s at least. We've had a model for document information extraction that we trained in (IIRC) 2018. It wasn't buzzy - but none of this stuff is new.