Can someone explain why AI is getting so much attention from the tech community in last two years when it wasn’t the case before?

Its not like AI hasn't been around for years now. It's also not like Nvidia just released CUDA and graphic cards capable of doing AI work. Its also not like Machine Learning is new.

• Machine Learning has been used in scientific research for a long time now (atleast in Physics/Astronomy).
• Look at Cyberpunk video game. It released in 2020 and started development in 2016. It used AI to lip-sync character conversations into 10 languages. This was back in 2016-2020.
• GPT-1,2,3 was released in 2018/19/20. Here's a part from wiki about LLM – “Although decoder-only GPT-1 was introduced in 2018, it was GPT-2 in 2019 that caught widespread attention because OpenAI at first deemed it too powerful to release publicly, out of fear of malicious use.”.

Looking at that Sam Altman/Microsoft etc didn't think they should pour trillions into it or just buy all Nvidia chips? Nvidia earnings actually went down in 2019 lol.

All these companies knew about it years before. So what changed? Is it just that ChatGPT became public and people realised what it could do? or is there a more technical reason that justifies this?

I looked at dot-com bubble. That was spurred by creation of public Web which became accessible in 1993 – so naturally only after 1993 could people even imagine websites etc and then there were new startups blah blah. Something, that couldn't have been anticipated, actually changed to cause the hype and new funding.

But this time around it seems to me like nothing fundamentally changed. Did companies/investors just overlook use of AI until 2022? Then looking at ChatGPT suddenly realised they were missing out on a trillion dollar industry that will revolutionize human lives? I am really confused about what happened. So please ELI5.

Edit – I will summarize what people are saying in comments and share this tweet someone commented- https://x.com/buccocapital/status/1828407633541296603

Most important part is about scaling laws and emergent properties. Essentially – AI is showing unexpectedly “intelligent” properties at higher compute powers (emergent properties) and these companies now believe that this will scale at even higher compute powers. No one know what will happen. It might happen that the emergent properties was a one time thing and AI may never get more intelligent or it will continue and we get a “Digital God” (according to the tweet).

So something did change in last couple of years, and the reason no one invested before was because no one saw it coming and it was an emergent property.