> It took ~5 years from when people in the NLP literature noticed BERT and knew the powerful applications that were coming, until the public at large was aware of the developments via ChatGPT. It may take another 5 before the public sees the developments happening now in the literature hit something in a companies web UI.

It also may take 10, 20, 50, or 100 years. Or it may never actually happen. Or it may happen next month.

The issue with predicting technological advances is that no one knows how long it'll take to solve a problem until it's actually solved. The tech world is full of seemingly promising technologies that never actually materialized.

Which isn't to say that generative AI won't improve. It probably will. But until those improvements actually arrive, we don't know what those improvements will be, or how long it'll take. Which ultimately means that we can only judge generative AI based on what's actually available. Anything else is just guesswork.