But since its creators and as of my knowledge everyone else totally did not see it coming, that you can now give a vague prompt full of spelling errors - and get returned a working program - I would say it is pretty close to magic (as in we don't really understand why it works so good).
I also don't see how you cannot call it AI. Especially since simple chess engines and alike were called AI long ago. So it is not general strong AI and has no consciousness and no mind and is pretty dumb too often - but the general concept - getting from a some vague text to a working program has some connection to intelligence to me.
But it's not actually magic. Technical people understand that it's just software running on computers.
The bigger mistake would be trivializing the rest of the technology involved just because LLMs are the newest piece. LLMs are only "magic" because they're built on a stack that was already "magic" without them.
LLMs are impossible without:
- operating systems
- programming languages
- compilers
- data centers / power grids / air conditioning
- servers / switches / routers
- CPUs / RAM / GPUs / SSDs
- fiber networks
- etc
One of the lesser, but still underdiscussed ramifications is that I think it has limited the public's ability to comprehend the Yann LeCunn argument, that genuine AI is likely possible but that LLMs and transformers are a dead end and we need to explore different modalities
I’m not sure it’s net negative or not. I’ve found that it’s reductive though. We have this really broad field of artificial intelligence reduced down to at worst a “slop machine” and at best a single tool.
Imagine being a CS professor that studied AI in the 90s and how you have to over explain you don’t mean LLM chatbots to a layman.