Neither is impressive solely because we've gotten used to them. Both were mind-blowing back in the day.

When it comes to AI - and LLMs in particular - there’s a large cohort of people who seem determined to jump straight from "impossible and will never happen in our lifetime" to "obvious and not impressive", without leaving any time to actually be impressed by the technological achievement. I find that pretty baffling.

I agree, but without removing search you cannot decouple. Has it embedded a regex method and is just leveraging that? Or is it doing something more? Yes, even the regex is still impressive but it is less impressive that doing something more complicated and understanding context and more depth.

I think both are very impressive, world shattering capabilities. Just because they have become normalized doesn't make it any less impressive in my view.

That's a fair point, and I would even agree. Though I think we could agree that it is fair to interpret "impressive" in this context as "surprising". There's lots of really unsurprising things that are incredibly impressive. But I think the general usage of the word here is more akin to surprisal.