It seems like they’ve accelerated our capabilities- previously tiresome and difficult-to-automate things are easier- but have done very little for our fundamental understanding. We have a tool, but cannot dissect it and explain how it fits together. LLM’a themselves don’t appear (happy to be wrong here) to actually have improved our understanding our NLP and associated theory. Yeah, it can parse a sentence and bang out some JSON/sql/mid-tier-essay, but these models (so far) aren’t helping us figure out how and why, and I think that understanding is critical to progress further. Anthropic seems to be trying to push a bit further on that front at least, but for all we know, they might just turn into another scummy OpenAI on us.