now that you mention it, a big "for entertainment purposes only" banner like they use to have on all the psychic commercials on tv would not be inappropriate. it's incredible that LLMs are being marketed as general purpose assistants with a tiny asterisk, "may contain inaccuracies" like it's a walnut contamination

Not sure what's being incredible here. GPT-4 is a stellar general-purpose assistant, that shines when you stop treating it as encyclopedia, and start using it as an assistant. That is, give it tasks, like summarizing, or writing code, or explaining code, or rewriting prose. Ask for suggestions, ideas. You can do that to great effect, even when your requests are underspecified and somewhat confused, and it still works.

I just wish they were advertised for generative tasks and not retrieval tasks. It's not intelligence, it's not reasoning, it's text transformation.

It seems to be able to speak on history, sometimes it's even right, so there's a use case that people expect from it.

FYI I've used GPT4 and Claude 2 for hundreds of conversations, I understand what its good and bad at; I don't trust that the general public is being given a realistic view.