For one, Deepdream is cool but was never designed to be photorealistic. It was intentionally degraded to create psychadelic imagery, unlike the contemporary computer vision models we know today.

And for two... LLMs are also getting to be pretty old. BERT and GPT-2 are both more than 5 years old, and still have fundamental issues that we can't be sure are solvable. They lie confidently, they conflate facts and fiction, they create entirely made-up scenarios when asked about real-world happenings. It should be extremely alarming that the only successful AI strategy to-date has been scaling-up an already inefficient model.

AI will improve with time, but it seems entirely plausible to me that we've already hit the proverbial "bathtub curve" of progress. I genuinely cannot imagine what a "generational leap" in LLM technology would look like, outside of fixing the hallucination issues.