I agree about timing, but not the speed:

> And today's AI, for as revolutionary as it may be, is taking just as long to mature as anything in the past.

They may be as expensive to mature (in terms of equivalent duration of total economic output), but by the wall-clock we've gone from "invent Transformers to make translation less bad" to "solves Millennium maths problems" in 9 years.

After 9 years of railroads… well, those were originally an Ancient Greek way to drag ships over an otherwise annoying bit of land, and the more modern attempt had wooden rails and a rope for humans and animals to pull for around 250 years so let's say after 9 years of the steam locomotive: 1784 for the prototype, 1802 for the "first full-scale working railway steam locomotive" (according to Wikipedia), so 9 years past the invention and it was still a prototype.

Semiconductors (well, transistors, i.e. us understanding the process and doing it deliberately, rather than getting lucky with cat's whiskers before we had any clue about quantum mechanics) did at least get commercialised in less than 9 years, but AFAICT in the form of "now our radios are better, sturdier, and smaller" which is a rather smaller change than what's already happened since Transformers.

(Of course, why Transformers, rather than the other attempts at AI? Transformers are when people cared this time around, but there have been previous AI bubbles. I'd argue those are like pointing at 1515 (or the Ancient Greeks) for the railway, or cat's whiskers for semiconductors).