I think you're underselling the field of language processing - it wasn't just a single field but a bunch of subfields with their own little journals, papers and techniques - someone who researched machine translation approached problems differently to somebody else who did sentiment analysis for marketing.
I had a friend who did PhD research in NLP and I had a problem of extracting some structured data from unstructured text, and he told me to just ask ChatGPT to do it for me.
Basically ChatGPT is almost always better at language-based tasks than most specialized techniques for the specific problems the subfields meant to address, that were developed over decades.
That's a pretty effing huge deal, even if it falls short of the AGI 2027 hype
I had a friend who did PhD research in NLP and I had a problem of extracting some structured data from unstructured text, and he told me to just ask ChatGPT to do it for me.
Basically ChatGPT is almost always better at language-based tasks than most specialized techniques for the specific problems the subfields meant to address, that were developed over decades.
That's a pretty effing huge deal, even if it falls short of the AGI 2027 hype