There's a weird tension between people who say saying "AI is overblown" and people who say "this is the most magical thing I've seen in my lifetime".

I lean towards the latter but with a healthy dose of "it's deeply weird and hard to get anything useful from". But that doesn't make it any less magical.

And no - it's not "intelligent" in any human sense.

But I can't relate to people who pooh-pooh it as if there's nothing exciting happening. Either they are deliberately cultivating a dismissive air, or they are deeply jaded and weary.

EDIT - There's a 3rd option. People are making a rhetorical point because they perceive a need to correct an imbalance in the general mood. This is actually the most likely explanation and is often under-appreciated as motivator in public statements. I've noticed it in myself frequently.

AI can be overblown and it can also be magical.

This was true for state of the art in 2010: https://xkcd.com/1425/ today you have a free phone app that does both. Of course it also classifies a spoon as a large breasted robin which is why you need a human in the loop. It's even truer in programming.

That xkcd actually claims the opposite: "some things that many people assume to be trivial CS problems actually require advancements in AI"

That's what I said. The converse is that despite the huge advance the model is still incredibly fragile and quite useless outside the niche for which it was trained for.