It is astonishing, even more so that some in this camp are smart people.

I chalk it up to "hype aversion" -- an internal heuristic that anything with so much hype around it must be bullshit. For some, there might also be good old resistance to change, to the unknown consequences of all these developments.

The people who are least impressed by GPT seem to be the ones who've never tried to build anything similar, even a text adventure game.

Industry outsiders also tend to take ML for granted, even when the 'experts' can see it's completely inappropriate. (My GF, a few years ago: "Why do we still need judges and juries? Can't computers judge cases and author legal opinions?" Me, at the time: "LOL, no, that would be ridiculous, and here's why..." Me, today: "Uh, about that argument we were having...")

I find generative AI very impressive, but impressive in the sense of "wow, it's impressive that an algorithm can do that." If I ignore the fact that something was algorithmically generated, then I'm not impressed by the generated output on its own.