With ChatGPT, the only thing new was the chat interface. In fact even Sam Altman mentioned this on Lex Fridman's podcast, IIRC - he said what he was most surpri

With ChatGPT, the only thing new was the chat interface. In fact even Sam Altman mentioned this on Lex Fridman's podcast, IIRC - he said what he was most surprised about was the outsized effect the interface had on bringing LLM to the forefront of public consciousness, despite the existing maturity of the underlying GPT models. At least in that case it was OpenAI adding interactivity to its own existing models. But similarly, from a more holistic viewpoint, OpenAI productized existing research from Google. Transformer models were "old tech" since Google published "Attention is all you need" in 2017... and yet, when OpenAI managed to turn it into a usable product, suddenly they became the first movers and the company to beat. So I'm not convinced that only a "dumb" investor would fund an effort with a proven ability to productize "old tech."