I think it's also a matter of expectation. People expecting conscious thinking machines with reasoning abilities are going to be disappointed but that doesn't mean AI as a field is useless and a big hoax. There are plenty of narrow problems where we can benefit from the use of AI. I am an MD and I see a lot of use cases of AI based technology in the future within the medical field though it needs more co-work between AI researchers and medical researchers. Good quality scientific validation of these systems needs to take place and that will take some time.

People don't understand what exponential improvement means. GPT-3 is a 175B with B parameter model. Another few rounds of doubling and we could be seeing models spit out short stories and novellas.

Have you read the GPT-3 paper? The authors are pretty forthright about how the GPT techniques likely won't scale much beyond 175B parameters.

Yet, the darn thing still can't reason.

They "can't reason" but they can solve symbolic integration and differential equations (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.06462.pdf), beat us at all board games, and more recently get to be almost impossible to tell apart from human writing (GPT3).

Five years ago we would have said "the darn thing still can't write a cohesive paragraph".

That's still true. It can write a paragraph that's usually grammatical, and can stay on topic, but it's missing things like facts, or even the ability to remember which side of an argument it's taken previously.

I think over the course of several paragraphs that's true, but within one it tends to be pretty good.

People look at the present and feel like that's all that's there. You don't look at a 2-year old and say he barely makes any intelligible sounds yet.

To be fair, it wasn't trained to.

To be really fair, I think you need to more precisely define what you mean by "reason". It absolutely CAN reason by some measures.