I agree it's overhyped, but the transition to a general purpose classifier (vs a narrow scope classifier) is new and noteworthy.

Ie the famous "Hotdog" clip from Silicon Valley [0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs

Maybe noteworthy but definitely not new. The category of zero-shot classification has been around for a while.

Example (2022):

https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/zero-shot_cl...