People are paying hundreds of dollars a month for these tools, often out of their personal pocket. That's a pretty robust indicator that something interesting is going on.
When I read (when everyone reads), I'm learning new words, new expressions, seeing how other people (the writer in this case) thinks, etc. The point was never just the information. This is why everyone becomes a retard when they rely on the "AI"... we've all seen those horror stories and don't know whether to believe them or not, but we sort of suspect that they must be true if embellished. You know, the ones where the office drone doesn't know how to write a simple email, where the college kid turning in A-graded essays can't scribble out caveman grunts on the paper test. I will refrain from deliberately making myself less intelligent if I have any say in the matter. You're living your life wrong.
And, like Wikipedia, they can be useful to find your bearing in a subject that you know nothing about. Unlike Wikipedia, you can ask it free-form questions and have it review your understanding.
Unfortunately the LLM does not (and cannot) know what points are important or not.
If you just want a text summary based on statistical methods, then go ahead, LLMs do this cheaper and better than the previous generation of tools.
If you want actual "importance" then no.
Sure, but that's not why me and others now have ~$150/month subscriptions to some of these services.
It seems like this argument is frequently brought up just because someone used the words "thinking", or "reasoning" or other similar terms, while true that the LLMs aren't really "reasoning" as a human, the terms are used not because the person actually believes that the LLM is "reasoning like a human" but because the concept of "some junk tokens to get better tokens later" has been implemented under that name. And even with that name, it doesn't mean everyone believes they're doing human reasoning.
It's a bit like a "isomorphic" programming frameworks. They're not talking about the mathematical structures which also bears the name "isomorphic", but rather the name been "stolen" to now mean more things, because it was kind of similar in some way.
I'm not sure what the alternative is, humans been doing this thing of "Ah, this new concept X is kind of similar to concept Y, maybe we reuse the name to describe X for now" for a very long time, and if you understand the context when it's brought up, it seems relatively problem-free to me, most people seem to get it.
It benefits everyone in the ecosystem when terms have shared meaning, so discussions about "reasoning" don't have to use terms like "How an AI uses jumbled starting tokens within the <think> tags to get better tokens later", and can instead just say "How an AI uses reasoning" and people can focus on the actual meat instead.