It's all so tiring.

Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea.

As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which is very promising.

Just a year and a half ago their maximal use was rephrase, summarize, and homework-level tasks.

Five years from now? There be dragons.

"But are they generally intelligent?" What a meaningless question!

Not meaningless because part of the discussion is the issue of anthropomorphizing this tech. When we use language like “intelligent” it carries hints of personhood. People begin sadly treating these things as persons.

We can reap the benefits while clearly telling the consumer this is just a language algorithm.

Personhood is poorly defined.

Maybe. I dunno. But it's also something worth to care deeply about.

Five years ago they were a niche toy for generating plausible text for entertainment. I was using one. It was an amazing party trick. Now they're popular toys thanks to their ability to entertain CEOs, and they can maintain coherence longer thanks to KV caches and more compute, and someone slapped a chat interface on top, but they're fundamentally the same.