Agree, though plain old Bayesian classifiers have been able to handle some significant portion of that office work for a long time. And not much ever came from it for everyday stuff outside of spam filters.
Maybe both the buzz factor and broader applicability means it's more likely to happen this go around?
More like: the accessibility is what will make it go around. The accessibility is what changes everything! Getting an easy to use interface (instructions) over python changes the accessibility from the denizens of this website to ~anyone with a computer
Essentially, being label efficient is more important than being compute efficient, because the biggest computing constraint we have is enough humans doing the labeling (and knowing how to work a jupyter notebook), not tensor smashing nvidia cards
Ease of use is what is going to change everything. Using natural language to ask something and getting an answer is different from what we had before. I knew I could automate a lot of my paperwork with scripts but as I am not a programer I never gave it more than a cursory look. Last Dec while playing around with ChatGPT I was able to get it to write some python scripts that resulted in my spending less than 20-25 min on tasks that I was spending 20-25 hours on. Now could I have written the scripts myself probably but it would have taken me months whereas with chat gpt it took me 2-3 hours to get a working scripts and another 1-2 hours to optimise them.
Maybe both the buzz factor and broader applicability means it's more likely to happen this go around?