Maybe a different analogy will make my point better. Compare rocket technology with jet engine technology. Both continued to progress across a vaguely comparable time period, but at no point was one a substitute for the other except in some highly specialized (mostly military-related) cases. It is very clear that language models are very good at something. But are they, to use the analogy, the rocket engine or the jet engine?
With GPT bots, the technology is only 6 years old. I can easily see it progressing for at least one decade.