One thing that is important to note is that to many this seems like an overnight success, but this guy has been cooking ChatGPT since 2017? I don't think at many points this seemed like it'd be this successful. It looked just like what google was going, some moonshot in some lab, that might in a few decades be a building block for real AI. And this was never cheap. Something to be said for making capital available for R&D and how some countries are doomed to lag due to aversion to this, governments and private parties alike.
Altman succeeded in reaching "the inflection point" on the PMF curve.
The other projects you allude to don't get their funding because most people who control budgets can only visualize the future with linear extrapolation.
You spend a LONG time in the low and flat part of your development before that starts to pick up, and up, and UP!
Homo Sapiens as a technology company were in the "fuck around with rocks" phase for 99% of their existence as a corporation. Agriculture in the final 1% of the development timeline allowed for industrialization in the final 0.05% of the time, which allowed for Large Language Models in the final 0.0001% of the time.
Had there been project managers and VPs in charge of deciding if our species was worth further investment, we'd have been canned in 800,000 BC.
It quite literally was. It had some of the fastest growing user growth ever. There was something like a million new users just days after ChatGPT launch.
(Not mine, stole it from the Twitter thread. Just thought it was funny.)