By 2020/2021 with the release of GPT-3, the trajectory of a lot of the most obvious product directions had already become clear. It was mainly a matter of models becoming capable enough to unlock them.
E.g. here's a forecast of 2021 to 2026 from 2021, over a year before ChatGPT was released. It hits a lot of the product beats we've come to see as we move into late 2025.