The Industrial Revolution was literally “are you truly impressed by a machine that can weave cloth as well as your grandmother”? And the answer was yes because one person could be trained to use that machine in much less time than it took to learn to weave. And they could make 10 times as much stuff in the same time.

LLMs are literally the same kind of progress.

Except we are not 200 years later when the impact on the world is obvious and not up for debate. We are in the first few years where the “machine” would be broken half the time and its work would have obvious defects.

Honestly, yes I am impressed when you compare what was possible with NLP prior to LLMs. Your question is akin to asking: are you truly impressed by a machine that can stick blocks together as well as some random person? Regardless of whether you are impressed, significant amounts of human labour can be reproduced by machines in a manner that was previously impossible. Obviously there's still a lot of undeserved hype, but let's not pretend that replicating human language is trivial or worthless.

I recently created a week-long IT training course with an AI. It got almost all of it right, only hallucinating when it came to details I had to fix. But it took a task that would have taken me a couple months to a couple weeks. So for specific applications it is actually quite useful. (Because it's basically rephrasing what a bunch of people wrote on Reddit.)

For this use case I would call it as revolutionary as desktop publishing. Desktop publishing allowed people to produce in a couple days what it would have taken a team of designers and copy editors to do in a couple weeks.

Everything else I've used it for it's been pretty terrible at, especially diagnosing issues. This is due particularly to the fact that it will just make shit up if it doesn't know, so if you also don't know you can't just trust it and end up doing research and experimentation yourself.