ChatGPT is not the breakthrough it's been made out to be. Yann LeCun has explicated this quite well.
It seems like we lack a word in English for knowing too much about a subject that you can't see the forest for the trees.
To say chatGPT is not revolutionary is as good an example of not seeing the forest for the trees that I can think of.
What comes across is someone who downplays both the effort involved with and the importance of the “boring” stuff, the tweaks and product design that tie everything together, but we actually don’t know that he thinks like that. We just know that he said some things that can be excerpted to sound that way.
This would be like saying software isn't novel - everything is just an extension of that first NAND/NOR gate or that it's not useful because the computer doesn't actually understand the knowledge it's storing and is therefore no better than a clay tablet.