Watching the entire economy of a superpower bet its entire future on SOTA text autocomplete models has been interesting to watch (which I think you're referring too).

Previous Empires naively bet their entire future on the words of magicians, or people who claimed they could look into water, the sky and fire and tell you what the future is going to be.

Machine Learning Engineers are the modern day Empire's court magician.

Eh, in this use case it's more like a goofy search engine.