AI seems to have gone through periods of relative stagnation punctuated by leaps forward. Neural networks were the next big thing when I was in college in the late 80s. Then fuzzy logic. Computer vision was limited maybe 30 years ago but has had some surges due to new algorithms and faster processors. Bayesian algorithms (Hidden Markov Models etc) got big fighting spam but helped a lot with speech to text (STT). LLMs are the next big leap forward from that area of research. I think we still have a number of major leaps to go before we have an AGI, though. But if LLMs follow the same progression as text to speech (TTS) or STT, in 10-20 years it will be impressively good.