But look at the way these companies talk about these models they're deploying, how people talk about using them here on HN and elsewhere: so much of it is about

But look at the way these companies talk about these models they're deploying, how people talk about using them here on HN and elsewhere: so much of it is about just asking questions and getting correct answers. All the people talking about how it will destroy Google, how they're using it to learn or teach some topic, etc., Microsoft integrating one into a search engine, the gloss on them as "assistants." The older, less-capable models were used for things more aligned to being just text-generation: "creativity" stuff. But the newer, bigger models and the human-feedback stuff to prod the models into following instructions and being more accurate have really pushed the conversation into this more "Star Trek computer" space. I'm thinking of it kind of like the uncanny valley. On the lower end of the scale, you don't really trust the machine to do anything, but as it gets more and more capable, the places where it doesn't work well become more and more significant because you are trusting and relying on it.