AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew.

*Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.