I don't know if anybody is following this thread anymore, but I find it interesting how similarly your timelines match what it was like to experiment with POV-Ray (a ray-tracing renderer) back in the early 1990s. Your difference in problem scope was like whether you had "a couple spheres on a checkerboard plane" or something more like "a chess set". Things seemed to change rapidly due to Moore's Law and the changes in brute force computing power available to normal people.

Computers got much more powerful in the next 30 years, and ray-tracing or various related techniques appear in more tool sets and games, they didn't fundamentally change the world of image generation or consumption. Most people still roughly interact as before, just with more details in the eye candy.

Are we seeing these large language models today at a tipping point towards unfathomable societal impact, or as something like ray tracing in the 1990s? Will more compute power send us spiraling towards some large-model singularity, or just add more pixels until we are bored of seemingly endless checkerboard planes covered in spheres and cones... I don't know the answer, but it seems like we're seeing camps divided by this question of faith.