No I'm fairly certain it was invented and that this style of breathless science fiction roleplay will be looked back on as an embarrassing relic of the era.
I didn't even read the article and know that the headline is 100% correct.
It's the result of stochastic hill climbing of a vast reservoir of talented people, industry, and science. Each pushing the frontiers year by year, building the infra, building the connective tissue.
We built the collection of requirements that enabled it through human curiosity, random capitalistic process, boredom, etc. It was gaming GPUs for goodness sake that enabled the scale up of the algorithms. You can't get more serendipitous than that. (Perhaps some of the post-WWII/cold war tech even better qualifies for random hill climbing luck. Microwave ovens, MRI machines, etc. etc.)
Machine learning is inevitable in a civilization that has evolved intelligence, industrialization, and computation.
We've passed all the hard steps to this point. Let's see what's next. Hopefully not the great filter.
I don't have a problem with the headline but the article is kind of bad.
And the headline is vague enough that you could read many meanings into it.
My take would be going back to Turing, he could see AI in the future was likely and the output of a Turing complete system is kind of a mathematical function - we just need the algorithms and hardware to crank through it which he thought we might have 50 years on but it's taken nearer 75.
The "intelligence did not get installed. It condensed" stuff reads like LLM slop.
