It’s more than that. Scaling LLMs had a fundamental problem - that it took $10b+ of investment to become useful. To get over this huge activation hump, you had to hype the thing as world changing. If you sold it as autocomplete you would never raise the money to do even autocomplete.

That’s why the AI heads all have extremely dramatic narratives. They are the end product of a selection tournament for raising massive amounts of money pre-product.