You should all see the story about the invention blue LEDs. No one believed that it could work except some japanese guy (Shuji Nakamura) who kept working on it despite his company telling him to stop. No one believed it could ever be solved despite being so close. He solved it and the rewards were astronomical.
This could very well be another case of being so close to a breakthrough. Two years since GPT-3 came out is nothing. If you were paying any sort of attention you would see there are promising papers coming out almost every week. It’s clear there is a lot we don’t know about training neural nets effectively. Our own brains are the proof of that.