Much much bigger than cloud computing. Cloud computing is more like steam engine to the internal combustion engine. ICE allowed for airplanes, but not as big a deal as moving from animal power to chemical power. AI is closer in significance to the transistor. Before the transistor, you could do the same things with vacuum tubes. The scale of the transistor made so much more possible. You can accomplish a lot of what AI does with millions of hand-written rules, but AI automates the generation of these rules.
I'm so glad that some companies/people are building and releasing models to the public. This amazing development being exclusive to OpenAI would've been a terrible situation for the world.