The vast majority of people use a model built by someone else through a high-level abstraction and then make broad claims about what the technology will be capa

The vast majority of people use a model built by someone else through a high-level abstraction and then make broad claims about what the technology will be capable of. Then you have the people who are leveraging the technology to train models from scratch and that population is far more apt to believe that large models can be general purpose AI (by some definition). Sure there are other things at play like money, publicity, reputation, and a desire to do something important. But there is also the very clear trend line where transformers are able to model pretty much any sequence of tokens where there is pretraining scale data available. Whisper was not a surprise. GPT-4v was not a surprise. Sora was not a surprise.