Technology

I actually have some domain expertise so excuse me if I don't just eat up that overexcited ignorant fanboy pap and phamplet from one of the very companies trying to profit for such things.

GAI (General Artificial Intelligence, i.e. a "thinking machine") would indeed be that "incredible creation of humanity", but that's not this shit. This shit is a pattern matching and pattern reassembly engine - a technologically evolve parrot capable of producing outputs that mimic what was present in its training sets to such a level that they even parrot associations that were present in their training sets (i.e. certain questions get certain answers, only the LLM doesn't even understand them as "questions" and "answers" just as textual combinations).

~~Insuficiently intelligent people with no training in hard sciences often actually confuse such perfect parroting of that which intelligent beings previously produces with actually having intelligence, which is half part hilarious and half part sad.~~

Edit: that was actually unfair, so let me put things better: some reactions to the hype on this AI remind me of how my grandmother - an illiterate old lady from the countryside who had been very poor most of her life - used to get very confused when she saw the same actor in multiple soap operas. The whole concept of actors and Acting was beyond her life experience so when I was a kid and she had moved to live with us in the "big city", she took what she saw on TV at face value. I suspect a lot of people who have no previous understanding of the domain and related are going down the same route of reasoning on AI as my nana did on soap operas, so end up confusing the LLM's impeccable imitation of human language use with there actually being a human-like intelligence behind it, just like my nana confused the "living truthfully in imaginary circunstances" of good actors with the real living it imitated.