all built off of decades of research and a lot of the specific advancements recently happen to be fairly small innovations into previous research infused with a crapload of cash and hype>

That's exactly what I mean! The research projects I've been 5-7 years ago had already created LLMs like this that were as impressive as GPT. I don't mean that the things that are going on aren't impressive, I just mean that there's nothing actually new. That's all. IT's similar to the previous hype wave that happened in AI with machine learning models when google was pushing deep learning. I really just want to point that out.

EDIT: Typo