“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.
LOL. Yep. That's what AI is. Just computers romping through a bunch of data.
Again, see tagline.