I'm surprised this article is getting upvoted - it feels like very lazy journalism to me.
> The discomforting reality is that, while Altman and his ilk have been predicting an exponential acceleration of productivity, we have been experiencing a deceleration.
This is a very big claim, and there is absolutely nothing to back it up. The only specific reference to productivity is about an MIT paper that showed increases in worker productivity (but the authors of this just wave that aside as unimportant because they didn't think the work it was doing was important).
> More dangerously, ChatGPT can make authoritative statements that sound believable but turn out to be false if investigated closely.
We get it! We know! But look, this is a bad use case for GPT. If you pretend that it only has a single use case, and you pick the use case that it's worst at, you will think it's bad. This is just so, so lazy. No references to summarizing docs or writing code/SQL queries/Excel formulas or any of the other things that it's genuinely useful at.
> At best, LLMs can be used for rough first drafts of low-value writing tasks with humans filling in the details and checking for rants and lies.
Rants? Come on - GPT hallucinates, but it's not an unhinged lunatic that goes ranting about stuff. Also, again, this is not all they can be used for - it just ignores all of the better use cases.
> What about Altman's vision of humans appreciating art and nature while most of the world's goods and services are produced by AI? We have a lot more respect for the work that people do than for the usefulness of LLMs.
Huh? It's great that you respect the work people do, but that has nothing to do with whether they'll affect society.
> ChatGPT is entertaining but it is, at most, a baby step towards an AI revolution and, at worst, a very expensive detour away from the holy grail of artificial general intelligence.
What? This is the closing to the article and it just throws out this enormous claim, which is backed up by absolutely nothing. It's demonstrably a big step towards an AI revolution - if nothing else, it's brought a ton of money and interest into the space, which is certainly important for a revolution.
But to say it's a detour away from AGI and then give absolutely no explanation of why that is or what direction AI research should be going? This is very poor journalism.