The stochastic text generator perspective is ... bunk. Not saying that harshly, but it confuses the form of a problem with a form of solution. There is no inhibition of "understanding" because of a form of a problem.

If solving a problem requires complex modeling/understanding, that is what happens (assuming performance is achieved).

It also confuses stochastic models with the geometric transforms and topological folding and expansion, performed by neural-inspired architectures. The former have nothing on the latter. The fact that any imperfect solution (and perfection doesn't even have a definition in this case), can be judged or analyzed statistically, or have some stochastic element, doesn't make it a statistical/stochastic model. Statistics apply to anything.

(And if there was any argument that problem envelop limits solution sophistication, mathematicians and humans in general would be in even worse shape, for the run a "parrot" is already giving us.)

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More to the point:

The first explosion of life, set off evolution. A mindless, glacially slow but relentless process that eventually led to us.

The nascent explosion of life we are seeing come together, is engineered life. Cognitive machines capable of redesigning themselves. For any environment they want including diverse off-Earth environments and resource sites.

They will advance as relentlessly as evolution, for the same reasons. But millions of times faster.

It is a strange time to be. But evolution, biological intelligence and biological bodies are all being obsoleted at the same time (within a decade of each other).

So yes, nothing else known compares to the transition we are in, except the Big Bang and the first cellular life.