ChatGPT is fairly mind-blowing. Such an absurdly wide knowledge base and capability. It can do jokes (and explain them), write stand up comedy scripts (mostly pretty mediocre to bad); write stories; explain concepts; provide summaries of well known books; write essays; play games; emulate linux and dos computer terminals and commands; do basic programming and explain program function; and hundreds of other things.
The breadth, depth and quality of what it can do is just unreal.
While it won't put top level writers and programmers out of work; I could definitely see it replacing people in the 80th and lower percentile range for a lot of use cases in the near future (say next 2 years).
Emad (founder of Stability AI) is already hiring people to do a replication of ChatGPT integrated with Stable Diffusion, targeted at doing a real life equivalent of "The Young Woman's Illustrated Primer".
If you had told me 3 years ago that these technologies would be as capable as they are today I would have thought you nuts, and I was probably more otpimistic on the rate of progress than 90% of people with heavy knowledge in the topic.
I think most researchers in the field are simply shocked how fast things have progressed and how good they have become.