[iugtmkbdfil834]

<< No one imagined LLMs in their current format

That is simply not accurate. There are examples of scifi novels, novellas and other media that dealt with it. We can argue over whether it was that exact format, implementation and so on, but that 'shape' ( to use a common llm term ) of technological advances was very much explored.

[stalfie]

I was referring more to the fact that no one predicted that next token predicting Transformers would go so far. Not about "AI" in general.