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I know it's popular to mention singularity in the context of AI, but i am afraid it doesn't do justice to the "real" singularity which is a mystery of both scientifical and mystical proportions.

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Just wait until efforts to improve the accuracy and usefulness of LLMs by implementing conceptual understanding in the models rather than pure language construction, maybe including physical interactions with the world as part of the training process, trigger a legitimate debate as to whether these things are conscious. Now that will make justice to the real singularity.

"trigger a legitimate debate as to whether these things are conscious"

That debate has been raging at least since The Mechanical Turk, and even now philosophers can't even agree on what consciousness is or if humans themselves are really conscious or some kind of automata.

Chatgpt simply brought such speculation to the masses, but it's been raging in academia and science fiction for quite some time.

The same debate has been going on since ELIZA was first introduced. The difference between arguing about a text generating model and one that inhabits a virtual world or can interact with the physical world is huge.

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