The Turing Test is in the same vein as the Drake Equation: a means to focus thought on how to approach finding a solution, not to find a definitive answer (and

The Turing Test is in the same vein as the Drake Equation: a means to focus thought on how to approach finding a solution, not to find a definitive answer (and who's existence in pop culture makes it a bigger thing than it is). The original Eliza should have be enough to render the Turing Test a moot point I feel. Personally (as someone who's worked in a ML-adjacent field for a number of years, and so seen the various ML waves), LLMs have so far been a resounding disappointment in comparison to other ML tools (the only cool thing I've seen come out of it was Google using LLMs to generate code to try to futz code even better), and have shown that while chasing the last 1% accuracy is interesting from both an engineering and mathematical perspective (which are entirely legitimate things to be interested in, though sadly they seem to have been lost to hype), simple-to-explain-and-understand less accurate methods (like a decision tree) are both cheaper to run and more predictable (which is what you usually want).