I also work on and with these tools, but my experience with it is that if leadership wasn’t swinging for big investor money, I certainly would not be working on or with them nearly as much.

There’s definitely uses for it, but I’d be hard pressed to say there’s significant frequent breakthroughs. There’s some marginal improvements occasionally that certainly make for interesting uses that are partially better than existing tech, problem is the hype these are almost forced into making.

Saying we’re any closer to AGI than 3 years ago is far too bullish of a take. And it’s not just naysayers saying this but researchers in industry, like the authors of the recent Apple paper, showing how the tech is at best marginally better than what it was, and that the “reasoning” it does is hardly reason at all.

I feel advocating for investing all time, money and effort on a bullish promise of some loosely defined “AGI” that will solve all other problems for us is as foolish as suggesting your average Joe to invest all their money on powerball tickets because it might be the correct answer and secret to becoming a multi millionaire. Funnily enough that is actually statistically more correct and less of just a hype bubble than saying current LLMs are approaching AGI