[tavavex]

I honestly don't think OpenAI anticipated it becoming as big of a deal, and they had to lean into grandiose expectations once it did become a big deal. They didn't have a grandiose marketing campaign to my memory - the only reason their tech exploded overnight was because it was something that made an average person interested. News of previous GPT versions and primitive image generators were passed around among techy people for years before that point. Maybe there's a threshold of generation quality, at which a user perceives it as something that can rudimentarily "understand" the input, and isn't just a generic chatbot.