And both of you seem correct.
Looking at short enough time window, and especially if you don't know those lower/deeper levels (concepts) - even more so if you focus on buzzword/trends - it does seem to change a lot.
With deeper and longer term context, and focus on concepts - IT is seemingly doing circles. From mainframes and thin clients to fat clients to big servers, to "serverless".
Last time I checked "serverless" it went from it's initial "So it's basically like CGI scripts - each request executes a program from scratch" to "And now it's faster with persistence" (so like FastCGI/Plack/etc).
Of course with orders of magnitudes improvements in memory size, execution & computation speed and bandwith/latency...
Every now and then, some things which were impractical/gimmicky and maybe even not possible (e.g. text to speech, sound/image to text, 3D/VR/raytracing, ML/AI ...) finally become possible.
And on occasion the sum of those "new but theoretically/conceptually old" things unlock something that's really kind of new - like video deepfakes.
To me personally - ChatGPT and similar still seem like just much less (but still a bit) gimmicky variant of those end of 1990s IRC and early 2000s phpBB chat bots.