The things feel closer to using a fine-grained search algo with some randomness and a fairly large corpus, than to interacting with something intelligent. And

The things feel closer to using a fine-grained search algo with some randomness and a fairly large corpus, than to interacting with something intelligent. And if you read how they work... that's because that's exactly what they are. There's no thinking going on. When using them, that they've been programmed and prompted to have some kind of tone or personality and to fit within some kind of parameters of "behavior" as if they're a real being reminds me of Flash-based site navigation in the early '00s: flashy bullshit that's impressive for about one minute and then just annoying and inconvenient forever. As for programming with them, writing the prompts feels more like just another kind of programming than instructing a human. I'm skeptical this entire approach is more than one small part of what might become AGI, given several more somewhat-unrelated breakthroughs, including probably in hardware. Like a lot of us, I've gotten sucked into building products with these things because every damn company on the planet, tech or not, has decided to do that for usually-very-bad reasons, and I'm a little worried this is going to crash so hard that having been involved in it at all will be a (minor) black mark on my résumé.