My point is the opposite of this point of view. I believe generative AI is the most significant advance since hypertext and the overlay of inferred semantic relationships via pagerank etc. In fact the creation of hypertext and the toolchains around it led to this point at all - neural networks were understood at that point and transformer attention is just an innovation. It’s the collective human assembly of language and visual interconnected knowledge at a pan cultural and global scale that enabled the current state.
The abilities of LLM alone to do astounding natural language processing beyond the ability of anything prior by unthinkable Turing test passing miles. The fact it can reason abductively, which computing techniques to date have been unable to is amazing. The fact you can mix it with multimodal regimes - images, motion, virtually anything that can be semantically linked via language, is breathtaking. The fact it can be augmented with prior computing techniques - IR, optimization, deductive solvers, and literally everything we’ve achieved to date should give anyone knowledgeable of such things shivers for what the future holds.
But I would never hold that generative AI techniques are replacements for known optimal techniques. But the ensemble is probably the solution to nearly every challenge we face. When we hit the limits of LLMs today, I think, well, at least we already have grand master beating chess solvers and it’s irrelevant the LLM can’t directly. The LLM and other generative AI techniques in my mind are like gasses that fill through learned approximation the things we’ve not been able to solve directly, including the assembly of those solutions ad hoc. This is why since the first time BERT came along I knew agent based techniques were the future.
Right now we live at time like early hypertext with respect to AI. Toolchains suck, LLMs are basically geocities pages with “under construction” signs. We will go through an explosive exploration, some stunning insights that’ll change the basic nature of our shared reality (some wonderful some insidious), then if we aren’t careful - and we rarely are - enshitification at scale unseen before.