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LLMs are not the most important breakthrough in AI ever, in the same way the NFTs are not the most important breakthrough in digital commerce ever. It's just a load of hype to generate big funding rounds. At least there's no cartoon apes this time around.

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I agree that LLMs are not the most important AI breakthrough ever, but your characterization seems needlessly harsh, as LLMs undeniably have utility.

The transformer architecture is arguably the most important breakthrough in NLP, and language is the predominant mode of communication between humans, so I fail to see how its "just a load of hype"

Could you name a bigger breakthrough in AI?

I'd say the Multi-Layer perception itself.

Maybe even convolutional neural networks, because they showed that ANNs are viable and are what really got the ball rolling.

CNNs are from the 1980s (the "neocognitron" by Kunihiko Fukushima [1]), while the MLP is from 1958 [2]. So nearly half a century, resp. a century old.

[1] K. Fukushima, Neocognitron: A Self-organizing Neural Network Model for a Mechanism of Pattern Recognition Unaffected by Shift in Position.

[2] F. Rosenblatt, The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model For Information Storage And Organization in the Brain.

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