Generative AI is obviously more fun and productizable than classification, recognition, and recommendation AI, but is it also more technically and philosophically significant?

I personally think yes. In fact I think generative AI subsumes those other categories. All intelligence is generative

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

You can ask a generative AI to classify, recommend, or recognize. The reverse is not true. GenAI is a qualitative level up, not yet another application category.

True, one is a forward problem and the other is an inverse problem. Predicting p(X|y) is harder than the reverse if X is high dimensional.  To make this possible we came up with a way to learn a very good prior on X using big NNs. The prior constrains the soln of inverse problem.