I agree with Chomsky, which is rare for me. My general thought is that people with an interest in pumping their bags will exaggerate the power of their products. So of course these guys are gonna say things like this. I'm not saying they don't believe them. They may or may not. The point is to keep their bias in mind.

What I hear people (smarter than me) say is that their is the brain and the mind. I'm not gonna pretend to understand either but my gut tells me that the AI's (different kinds) are something different from a organic brain. If you believe that the human brain evolved to be useful to humans over a massive amount of time it would not make sense to try to completely replicate it in a machine. Just as we do not try to replicate how humans lift things. Machines can lift far more but they do it better because they do NOT copy humans.

I think the dudes that pitch AI are using parlor tricks to impress humans into buying into their businesses. They are imitating human language and statistically predicting what we humans would expect to get as an answer. There are similarities with how humans think but its different. I'm not even saying this is bad that chatbots are doing it different. Its what I would expect a computer to do.

There are many issues with our brains and how we think. We have many deficiencies and many of us struggle with our brains or minds. Not sure which one actually. Maybe its both. I don't think these machines are trying to build those in nor should they.

We can see from history that you can make machines that do pretty much any repeatable task better than a human but its not a human. Chess is a common example and yet people prefer to watch a real human play the game.

This whole topic is interesting to me and what it continues to point out to me is how massive the gap is in our understanding of the brain and the mind. Its easy for us to use our cultural lens and be blind to how much we still do not know. While there have been massive leaps in understanding of our bodies we are still a long way from even understanding the brain and many ailments that affect our bodies. I firmly believe we are in the dark ages of medicine still. We still attack illness with blunt instruments. Don't get me wrong. Its massively better than it was 200 years ago but I think people don't get how far we have to go until they loss a family member to cancer or another common disease.

So it is VERY hard for me to believe that AI is anywhere close to an actual intelligence or a mind. I will admit that while my understanding of LLMs and chatbots is much better than it was a year ago I still do not have a really strong understanding of neural networks. On top of this I rarely hear anyone talking about AI that can explain it either. So I'm left thinking many people working on these machines are still trying to understand how they work... which isn't bullish on a massive breakthrough IMO. Then you top off the massive inefficiency for running these machines vs the value they provide and I think we are in for a massive correction in the next 5-10 years. That could set AI back for a long time.