[riscii68]

Personally-speaking, there aren't that many different consumer technologies or tech applications over the past 2+ decades that truly gave me an 'aha' moment. The Palm Pilot, Google Maps on an early Android phone come to mind.

When I began playing around with LLMs, I had my initial aha moment. It was far above either of those for me. So, I think that collective aha moment we've been having the last few years (still) drives a lot of the excitement/hype.

If you view 'hype around [x]' as essentially a probability ranking problem, that is, whatever is most likely to give you your next aha moment generates the most hype, at any point in time. There's a decay element, too, if the reality doesn't match the expectations, then other technologies are viewed as more likely to produce that next big aha moment.

But for now I think this characterizes AI today more than other technologies.