I agree that LLMs are not extinction-level dangerous and somewhat share the skepticism that they should lead to AGI. (Although they are pretty capable given their lack of true intelligence and I think people will find ways to plug them into dangerous applications.)
But when LeCun defends AI, he defends "real", intelligent AGI (because he doesn't consider LLMs to be AGIs).
Goalposts (including mine surely) will get moved around to claim successes / no successes, but the balance is going to be well towards indifference to the tech as opposed to any real changes resulting from it.
1. The generality of this current crop of models is much higher than before which makes it really easy for non-experts to get started. 2016 deep learning still required lots of data cleaning, training, hyperparameter tuning, retraining, etc. This can lead to a lot more experimentation with lower barrier to entry.
2. The cost of using these models has become cheap enough where a lot of tasks that 2016 AI would have worked well on but were too expensive (due to labor required to build the models or compute required to train the model) are now within reach for a lot of businesses.
3. The internet of 2023 is a lot more varied than the internet of 2016. Using ML models to generate content wouldn't have made sense in 2016 where traditional media still captured a lot of people's interests but now with the rise of influencers and medium-sized fandoms, there's large markets to generate content associated with medium-sized brands.
On the other is a chatbot, that could what, "spew misinformation", take our jobs, someday through a mechanism not known and not related to how it works become sentient and hurt us? Seriously, the comparison is as absurd as the fear generally. There are way scarier things going on, it's sad we can't give them 1% of the attention we give things we made up completely.