Exactly this. LLMs are already some form of useful, and have some kind/level of intelligence. We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses. It isn't a step function and it isn't all or nothing. Even if LLMs get no better than they are today, we will still have valid practical applications that use them.

The problem is that this doesn't distinguish LLMs from other forms of software! The whole point of computers is to offload tasks requiring reasoning, and they've always helped us understand complex nonlinear systems is that computers work through the hideous details.

More significantly: many major advances in scientific or mathematical programming were heralded as a thinking computer! 50's numerical scientific programming, 60's Lisp+ symbolic programming, 70's logic and symbolic algebraic programming, 80's unifying all this with encyclopedias and NLP like Mathematica - all of this is clearly useful and cool, all designed to offload intelligence... and, with modern eyes, we see plainly that not a single shred of intelligence is required to execute any of it. The AI researchers of yesteryear consistently made cool computer programs and consistently overestimated their progress at cracking human intelligence. It is plain as day to me that ANN researchers are making precisely the same scientific and philosophical mistakes as yesteryear's symbolics researchers, and even Alan Turing. This does not diminish from the coolness of the computer programs. But pretending these systems are intelligent, even "verbally" intelligent, is bad for society.

It's bad for computer science, too. None of the progress in LLMs or ANNs gets us any closer to making a robot as smart as a cockroach. I doubt any of us will live to see that milestone.