This is how you know it is different. Because the people that were not treating mongo, graphql, microservices, the block chain, and web 3 as miracles are impressed by llm. Just like people that are not tech saavy.
There's hype and then there's overhype. We are clearly in the overhype category for LLMs, but there's absolutely no doubt they are going to change things.
In the 90s, the web was overhyped in the short run and under-hyped in the long run. We wrongly predicted 100% of people would do their shopping on the internet by 2005, but never dreamed Somali market traders would use it to discuss the price of fish, or that foreign hackers would use it to influence US elections.
It's funny you mention that because one of many concerns I can see with OpenAI might be, "... but is it web scale?" in that I could envision tight rate limits being imposed and then businesses having to pay exponentially more to get higher limits and passing those costs on to someone and these costs climb over time on some scale. New tech often operate at a loss until they get businesses dependent on their service.
I mean, it's true that we still don't know whether self-driving cars are a few years away, but the analogy with "LLMs are the beginning of AGI" is apt.
For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636198. The original video is gone but it lives on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs.