They're certainly useful, and the goalposts for what is "intelligent" keep shifting, but I think we're seeing only progress towards more polished bigger LLMs. I

They're certainly useful, and the goalposts for what is "intelligent" keep shifting, but I think we're seeing only progress towards more polished bigger LLMs. I don't think that progress implies there's a path from LLMs to something substantially better. LLMs are still prone to hallucinations, and we're only adding more data and workarounds to make it happen less often. Prompt injections limit their usefulness on untrusted inputs. They can't do precise logic and reasoning, and are too likely to follow memorized patterns instead. We've got something amazing, way better than what we've had before, but the current architecture is still based on a fuzzy translator. It's hard to say whether this is it, and it's going to plateau at this level for a while, or whether there are more breakthroughs around the corner.