Maybe I'm wrong, but this does not seem so much discovery as confirmation and more of simple illumination of something that has appeared to me at least to be s

Maybe I'm wrong, but this does not seem so much discovery as confirmation and more of simple illumination of something that has appeared to me at least to be self-evident, so much so that it's a core part of my explanation to lay people about what makes contemporary LLM and the like so powerful. I.e. it's a core feature, indeed it's the entire reason you have deep networks, to allow for abstractions. IMO the interesting ChatGPT stuff output is largely in this domain, it's quite obvious that much of what it is doing is not doable without something homologous to an internal representation.