I'm ignorant on this topic so please excuse me.  Why did `AI` happen now?  What was the secret sauce that OpenAI did that seemed to make this explode into being all of a sudden?

  My general impression was that the concept of 'how it works' existed for a long time, it was only recently that video cards had enough VRAM to hold the matrix(?) within memory to do the necessary calculations.

  If anybody knows, not just the person I replied to.