Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're past a certain threshold, maybe not AGI but some definite qualitative change is happening.
I mean DALL-E 2 was the first time my jaw really hit the floor, although in fairness GPT-3 probably should've done that, but it's easier to do with images. And then for this to drop just a month later? Insane. It makes you wonder if they're actually releasing cutting edge, or Google decided to write this paper just because of the publication of DALL-E 2. Maybe they've had this model in the bag for a year.
https://parti.research.google/
I think they've just got a lot of projects going on under the hood and timing was coincidence.