It's really not good enough yet, it's impressive for what it is in our current time. But we're looking at the 1980s computers.

They are neat, they are useful, but they can do so much more.

The problem is that you’ve identified two distinct and non-overlapping sets of people as “everyone”. Everyone who was applauding 3.5 when it came out were industry hype people. Even the critical voices were industry hype people, paid to assume the AI is powerful and write about the possible negative consequences of that assumption.

Now we’ve all gotten familiar with 3.5, and we’ve come to understand its limitations, so the public knows it’s not a “godlike” AI.

Luckily there’s a fresh new model, not technically different from the earlier one but it cost more money to build. The hype group can start again, citing the publicly known limitations of 3.5. But in 6 months we’ll understand what’s wrong with it, and the public will be talking about the limitations, just in time for 4.5.

I think it’s going to be like movie special effects.

When Jurassic park first came out, or even something like Star Trek next gen. It looked AMAZING. So so realistic. But then…. As time goes on new things showed us what realistic could be.

I think we actually got better at seeing.

Same thing here. The more time you spend with it the more you notice things that don’t quite work. And then the new thing solves those problems, but we’ll find more wrongness