And look at the airplanes, they really can’t just land on a mountain slope or a tree without heavy maintenance afterwards. Those people weren’t all stupid, they questioned the promise of flying servicemen delivering mail or milk to their window and flying on a personal aircar to their workplace. Just like todays promises about whatever the CEOs telltales are. Imagining bullshit isn’t unique to this century.

Aerospace is still a highly regulated area that requires training and responsibility. If parallels can be drawn here, they don’t look so cool for a regular guy.

> to me seems like people witnessing the airplane and complaining that it isn't "real flying" because it isn't a bird flapping its wings

To me it is more like there is someone jumping on a pogo ball while flapping their arms and saying that they are flying whenever they hop off the ground.

Skeptics say that they are not really flying, while adherents say that "with current pogo ball advancements, they will be flying any day now"

On the contrary, the pushback is critical because many employers are buying the hype from AI companies that AGI is imminent, that LLMs can replace professional humans, and that computers are about to eliminate all work (except VCs and CEOs apparently).

Every person that believes that LLMs are near sentient or actually do a good job at reasoning is one more person handing over their responsibilities to a zero-accountability highly flawed robot. We've already seen LLMs generate bad legal documents, bad academic papers, and extremely bad code. Similar technology is making bad decisions about who to arrest, who to give loans to, who to hire, who to bomb, and who to refuse heart surgery for. Overconfident humans employing this tech for these purposes have been bamboozled by the lies from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al. It's crucial to call out overstatement and overhype about this tech wherever it crops up.

I agree. If the LLMs we have today never got any smarter, the world would still be transformed over the next ten years.

People aren’t responding to their own assumption that AGI is necessary, they’re responding to OpenAI and the chorus constantly and loudly singing hymns to AGI.

> It doesn't need to be general intelligence or perfectly map to human intelligence.

> All it needs to be is useful.

Computers were already useful.

The only definition we have for "intelligence" is human (or, generally, animal) intelligence. If LLMs aren't that, let's call it something else.

I don't think many informed people doubt the utility of LLMs at this point. The potential of human-like AGI has profound implications far beyond utility models, which is why people are so eager to bring it up. A true human-like AGI basically means that most intellectual/white collar work will not be needed, and probably manual labor before too long as well. Huge huge implications for humanity, e.g. how does an economy and society even work without workers?

> Reading constant comments about LLMs can't be general intelligence or lack reasoning etc, to me seems like people witnessing the airplane and complaining that it isn't "real flying" because it isn't a bird flapping its wings (a large portion of the population held that point of view back then).

That is a natural reaction to the incessant techbro, AIbro, marketing, and corporate lies that "AI" (or worse AGI) is a real thing, and can be directly compared to real humans.

There are people on this very thread saying it's better at reasoning than real humans (LOL) because it scored higher on some benchmark than humans... Yet this technology still can't reliably determine what number is circled, if two lines intersect, or count the letters in a word. (That said behaviour may have been somewhat finetuned out of newer models only reinforces the fact that the technology inherently not capable of understanding anything.)

If I could put it into Tesla style robot and it could do dishes and help me figure out tech stuff, it would be more than enough.

This a thousand times.