Tesla stock has been riding on the self driving robo-taxies meme for a decade now ? How many Teslas are earning passive income while the owner is at work ?
Cherrypicking the stuff that worked in retrospect is stupid, plenty of people swore in the inevitability of some tech with billions in investment, and industry bubbles that look mistimed in hindsight.
As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them.
VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become widespread, but still weren't at all.
That's a big difference
ChatGPT is so useful, people without any technology background WANT to use it. People who are just about comfortable with the internet, see the applications and use it to ask questions (about recipes, home design, solving small house problems, etc).