> This is not "just" machine learning because we have never been able to do things which we are today and this is not only the result of better hardware. Better hardware is actually a byproduct. Why build a PFLOPS GPU when there is nothing that can utilize it?
This is the line of thinking I'm referring to.
The "context" problem had already been somewhat solved. The attention mechanism existed prior to Transformers and was specifically used on RNNs. They certainly improved it, but innovation of the architecture was making it computation efficient to train.
I'm not really following your argument. Clearly your acknowledging that it was first the case that with the hardware at the time, researchers demonstrated that simply scaling up training with more data yielded better models. The fact that hardware was then optimized for these for these architectures only reinforces this point.
All the papers discussing scaling laws point to the same thing, simply using more compute and data yields better results.
> this is not only the result of better hardware
Regarding this in particular. A majority of the improvement from GPT-2 and GPT-4 was simply training on a much larger scale. That was enabled by better hardware and lots of it.