At the same time, other AIs are constantly progressing at other, useful things, completely ignored by nearly everybody.
Perhaps, but with the ability to traverse the web and interface with applications, there might actually be a qualitative difference from chatbots of yore.
> At the same time, other AIs are constantly progressing at other, useful things, completely ignored by nearly everybody.
Interesting, such as what? Any examples?
> Interesting, such as what?
Factory robots, terrain traveling, object recognition, speech recognition, voice syntesis... On the symbolic side, have you looked at modern compilers and linters?
Language models should have a huge impact on search. And yes, search is a very impactful thing. But that too requires something a bit different from a chatbot. Not a complete new technology, but different applications.