That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine.The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could.
There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve original math problems and write novel proofs, for instance. The fact that they can do that sort of thing is a huge, huge deal... too big a deal to express in the terms you're using here.