Holy crap, thanks for sharing this. It's the first time a conversational AI has impressed me. I can just about find the edges (short memory, relentlessly positive) but in the space of an hour it's given reasonably good advice on social situations, answered questions about how it works and even recommended some great niche bands based on my existing tastes. Just as you said, its knowledge seems to be extremely broad.

There's a contrast between Pi and the kind of chatbot discussed in the article. When we talk to Pi we don't expect it to do anything for us - it just gives advice and makes suggestions that we can take or leave. The resulting stream of tokens matches our expectations enough to satisfy us.

A chatbot on a company's website however, probably we are talking to that because we want something to happen. "Please fix my account", "my last bill was wrong" etc. As the chatbot isn't integrated with the company's processes it can't actually change the state of the outside world and so talking to it will be a frustrating experience. I wonder if this will improve if/when chatbots get better integrated with systems? Will companies even dare to do this for real?