There's another point, too. Detractors say LLMs will never advance to whatever threshold they consider meaningful. Fine. We're working on other paradigms, too, though. Just because a lot of o people are productizing LLMs doesn't mean the state of the art isn't advancing in parallel and AGI isn't in the cards.

Agree, LLMs are just another tool. Treating them as chatbots is a very basic way of using them. The future is intelligent engineers embedding them in traditional systems and having them perform specific roles.