This kind of gets me, too. I'm seeing a lot of this "skeptics said we couldn't do this, but we did," but really? Predictions seem to have largely been wildly unrealistic. The creator of the first hardware perceptron in the late 1950s predicted it would be sentient with a decade. Clarke and Kubrick thought we'd have computers that resisted being turned off and could autonomously control spacecraft (and that we'd have human missions to Jupiter and a permanent station on the moon) 22 years ago, which we still don't have. Back to the Future II thoguht we'd have antigravity in 2015.

I recently did a full X-Files rewatch and the first episode involving AI comes up in season one, when a computer programmed to handle internal building security and temperature control becomes sentient, decides it doesn't want to be turned off or do what its system administrator tells it to any more, and decides to start killing people in the building, via cleverly calculated means that make the deaths look accidental. Scully, the skeptic in this situation, insists this kind of technology is decades away. Here we are, decades later, and I don't see anything with a capability anywhere close to defying its programming and carrying out murder plots that look like accidents.

It feels like people are being fooled into a single decade's worth of legitimately rapid and unexpected advances in autonomous game play and text generation and now acting like the entire history of computing and AI has been tech consistently exceeding expectations, but that has definitely not been true over any appreciable long term.