> There’s been a lot of news in the past couple years about LLMs but has there been any breakthroughs making headlines anywhere else in AI?

Yeah, lots of stuff tied to robotics, for instance; this overlaps with vision, but the advances go beyond vision.

Audio has seen quite a bit. And I imagine there is stuff happening in niche areas that just aren't as publicly interesting as language, vision/imagery, audio, and robotics.