And see my tagline.
As an aside, AI may be the normal or natural progression of computer software and hardware, as you say. But it also represents a quantum leap in the progression of such.
As an aside, there are things about the way that large language models/machine learning systems behave when trained on massive amounts of data that their designers/builders/scientists don't understand ("the black box effect").
“But it also represents a quantum leap”
Seriously, what is the quantum leap other than the rapid reduction in cost of data storage? Processor speed is not quantumly leaping.
“there are things about the way that large language models/machine learning systems behave when trained on massive amounts of data that their designers/builders/scientists don’t understand”
A computer romping through a bunch of data has always been able to produce unpredicted results, such as the surprising number of purple pigs. Nothing new here.
Speech and facial recognition are kind of new and impactful to the general public, but they’re nothing more than a pile of C++ code and the data it ploughs through.