Ask HN: Did AI profs gain respect overnight after ChatGPT was released?

Probably not? The majority of AI/ML academics that are actually teaching right now don't work on the transformer architecture. A handful of closely proximal people probably increased their profile, but certainly not ML professors as a whole.

Let me tell something else:

Just before the pandemic I have enrolled in a bachelors programme at University of London, majoring in AI/ML - just before the boom. I didn't do it because of some sixth sense, but my main hope was to get a (very) deep understanding of CUDA, and what I can really do with it, also on a theoretical level (and of course AI also sounds exciting on its own).

I left before graduation. Even the third year spent multiple lectures about installing python and pip, configuring some crappy ide, and finally doing some hello world level 20 lines long python script with pandas. This level was true for most classes, not only the AI-specific ones.

I was very disappointed, I definitely not got what I hoped for. Of course this is one person's anecdata of one specific place. And it's only tangentially related to your question, if it's related at all - but I think it fits.