Maybe my bar for what constitutes a breakthrough is lower than other people's, but all of these seem like breakthroughs to me:

NLP as a field saw huge shifts. NLP tasks that used to be complex and inaccurate can now be setup very easily and quickly using structured outputs from LLMs, often with greater accuracy.

A small charity I help with has now been able to build their own website to manage their day-to-day operations. It saves them a lot of time, and it was vibe-coded using Manus. I don't think people appreciate how much room there is left for bespoke software to have big impacts on small organisations that can't afford to hire developers. The cost for software like the one they made has gone from 10s of thousands of dollars to $10/month and volunteer hours.

My brother has recently been setting up Cowork to do an automatic review of contracts before human review, and he said it is far more diligent than people when it comes to routine things to check. This is another huge breakthrough for not just efficiency, but the quality of work.

I really don't think we can discount AI finding bugs and vulnerabilities. If you care about code quality and keep up review standard, LLMs can help you write more robust software. AI has found a huge number of bugs for me before they hit production, including potential out-of-bounds memory accesses and segfaults.

ChatGPT has 1 billion MAU. People are now getting life advice, financial advice, and mental health help from chatbots at a scale and cost that no human support network could match.