I guess it depends on what media you follow. As a Brit my recollection was hearing it was a novelty gadget that about a dozen American eccentrics were using, and then there was the story that a guy called Jimi Heselden bought the company and killed himself by driving one off a cliff and then that was about it. Not the same category as AI at all.
I was in the tech space in the UK at the time and the hype behind this was off the charts. I seem to remember a meeting with Bezos where he was super hyped about it, and we had no idea what "it" was still. The speculation was crazy.
