It was good enough in 2015/2016 for me to run a startup that allowed people to program in natural language. We even had paying clients though eventually none could stomach the $2000 per month for incremental/on-line training costs.

The only real difference between then and now is that OpenAI's models are significantly better than my models from 2015, and they have that because well, they can afford to pile on more data. TBH, I never even considered using a large proportion of the whole internet as a training set as even remotely possible due to the sheer mind boggling costs.

Even now, to go through about 10% of The Pile would cost me way too much money.