I was a bit involved in more old-school AI research in grad school around ~2000, with an interest in the sadly neglected field of Artificial Life. A lot of Alife is focused on the simulation of life-like behavior and at least part of the field leans towards more philosophical questions: "Can an artificial agent truly be alive? Can it truly think?".

I thought these were fascinating and very difficult to answer questions.

When I would tell people about the field and these questions 20 years ago, people thought the questions were laughable, and some thought I was a fringy werido. But now, it seems like the pendulum has swung completely to the opposite side: of course machines can think and be alive.

But for me, my position hasn't really changed: I still think these are fascinating and very difficult to answer questions, and the deep learning revolution of the past several years hasn't actually done much to answer them. What LLMs are doing right now is amazing - but hasn't really moved the needle on the deeper questions, and a lot of the people who think it has are Fooled by Non-Randomness (apologies to Taleb).