Check on the curve for flight speed sometime, and see what you think of that, and what you would have thought of it during the initial era of powered flight.
Maybe a different analogy will make my point better. Compare rocket technology with jet engine technology. Both continued to progress across a vaguely comparable time period, but at no point was one a substitute for the other except in some highly specialized (mostly military-related) cases. It is very clear that language models are very good at something. But are they, to use the analogy, the rocket engine or the jet engine?
