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".