LLM AI hype started well before ChatGPT.

This site and many others were littered with OpenAI stories calling it the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and other such nonsense going back to 2016.

And GPT stories kicked into high gear all over the web and TV in 2019 in the lead-up to GPT-2 when OpenAI was telling the world it was too dangerous to release.

Certainly by 2021 and early 2022, LLM AI was being reported on all over the place.

>For most of the world LLM's did not exist before those dates.

Just because people don't use something doesn't mean they don't know about it. Plenty of people were hearing about the existential threat of (LLM) AI long before ChatGPT. Fox News and CNN had stories on GPT-2 years before ChatGPT was even a thing. Exposure doesn't get much more mainstream than that.

> LLM AI was being reported on all over the place.

No, it wasn't.

As a proxy, here's HN results prior to November, 2022 - 13 results.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1667260800&dateRange=custom&...

Here's Google Trends, showing a clear uptick May 2023, and basically no search volume before (the small increase Feb. 2023 probably Meta's Llama).

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

As another proxy, compare Nvidia revenues - $26.91bln in 2022, $26.97bln in 2023, $60bln 2024, $130bln 2025. I think it's clear the hype didn't start until 2023.

You're welcome to point out articles and stores before this time period "hyping" LLM's, but what I remember is that before ChatGPT there was very little conversation around LLM's.

If you're in this space and follow it closely, it can be difficult to notice the scale. It just feels like the hype was always big. 15 years ago it was all big data and sentiment analysis and NLP, machine translation buzz. In 2016 Google Translate switched to neural nets (LSTM) which was relatively big news. The king+woman-man=queen stuff with word2vec. Transformer in 2017. BERT and ELMo. GPT2 was a meme in techie culture, there was even a joke subreddit where GPT2 models were posting comments. GPT3 was also big news in the techie circles. But it was only after ChatGPT that the average person on the street would know about it.

Image generation was also a continuous slope of hype all the way from the original GAN, then thispersondoesnotexist, the sketch-to-photo toys by Nvidia and others, the avocado sofa of DallE. Then DallE2, etc.

The hype can continue to grow beyond our limit of perception. For people who follow such news their hype sensor can be maxed out earlier, and they don't see how ridiculously broadly it has spread in society now, because they didn't notice how niche it was before, even though it seemed to be "everywhere".

There's a canyon of a difference between excitement and buzz vs. hype. There was buzz in 2022, there was hype in 2023. No one was spending billions in this space until a public demarcation point that, not coincidentally, happened right after ChatGPT.