Transformers came about in 2017, so extend the time horizon by a whopping 2 years and OP’s point remains.

AlexNet was 2012, which is what essentially kicked off the deep learning neural network revolution. The original implementation of AlphaGo utilized DNN in 2016 to beat Lee Sedol at Go, which people had been predicting was at least 5-10 years away.

So the timeline, spanning just under the last 12 years at this point: AlexNet -> AlphaGo (4 years) -> Transformers (1 year) -> GPT4 (6 years)

Imagine showing GPT4 to someone in 2012. They’d think it’s science fiction. The rate of progress has been absurd.