Yeah that's a fair point! It's def a more general tech thing, but I think there are a couple specific reasons why it comes up more here though. Firstly, I think most tech does not improve at the insane rate that AI has been historically, so people's perception of capabilities become out of date just incredibly rapidly here (think about how long people we're banging on about "AI can't draw hands!" well after better models came out that could). If you think of the line as a way to say "don't anchor on what it can do today!" then it feels more appropriate to go on about this more for a more rapidly-changing field

Secondly, I think there's a tendency in AI for some ppl to look at failures of models and attribute it to some fundamental limitation of the approach, rather than something that future models will solve. So I think the line also gets used as short-hand for "Don't assume this limitation is inherent to the approach". I think in other areas of tech there's less of a tendency to try to write off entire areas because of present-day limitations, hence the line coming up more often

So you're right that the line is kind of universally applicable in tech, I guess I just think the kinds of bad arguments that warrant it as a rejoinder are more common around AI?