Right. In 2011 Jeff Dean ran into Andrew Ng in the Google cafeteria, which AFAIK is where a lot of the modern Google AI started happening. AlexNet won the ImageNet challenge in 2012 (which HN was not impressed with at all at the time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). Attention is All You Need was published in 2017. A lot of behind the scenes, invite-only etc. stuff has been happening for years, and only in the past two years do we see DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, Gemini, Sora etc.