It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise.
Isn't that amazing ?
Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle.
The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ... AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this. And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics ..
Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.