I'm in the same boat. At a broader level, I've been thinking recently about how biased our late-stage view of "intelligence" is—it's so anchored on specificall

I'm in the same boat. At a broader level, I've been thinking recently about how biased our late-stage view of "intelligence" is—it's so anchored on specifically digital representation at this point. I think this stuff will get better. I also think we'll reach a turning point at which the sheer amount of content being generated (slop or not) leads to a total system breakdown and larger collectives of people will (re)discover the merits of analog living and more varietied forms of knowledge than just "linguistically mediated and available in the network". I also think about the "dark spots" in the LLM space and how its duals tendencies to (a) present the mean, and (b) to dilute/reduce once sophisticated, interactive learning to skimming of summaries (the point the OP makes about the cheapening of "deep" and "research") will in fact usher in a sort of second dark age for humanity. I was reading a bit of philosophy of science recently (Wartofsky) that argues that much of our building of theoretical knowledge happens through interaction—I worry that, as we increasingly mediate our building of thoughts and representations through "summary gist of the pasts" we diminish this crucial interactive component, and will ultimately be the worse for it.