For people not watching the AI/ML field closely (which is most, I suppose), I can imagine it felt like ChatGPT just "popped up". One day, AI was science fiction, and the next day it was (with qualifications) here.

But for people working in this field or watching closely, ChatGPT is just one of many, many data points on a performance curve that has been rising rapidly and consistently for about five years. Leaderboards on test suites (like this one) were skyrocketing month-by-month. So predicting that something like ChatGPT was coming was as simple as, "I bet that line that keeps going up is gonna keep going up."

One implication is that ChatGPT is almost surely not the end of the line; rather, we can be near-certain that ChatGPT will be "old school" by this fall.