A couple of years of this LLM AI hype train has blinded people to what was actually surprising about LLMs. The surprise wasn't that you could make a language model and it wasn't that a language model could generate text. Those are both rather pedestrian observations, and their implementations are trivial. The surprise of LLMs was that contemporary hardware could scale this far and that an un-curated training set turns out to contain a statistically significant amount of truth. Deep learning was interesting because we didn't expect that amount of computation to be feasible at this time in human history, not because nobody had ever thought of it before.

The surprise of the LLM AI was that they were somewhat truthful at all.