Perhaps the reason why ChatGPT has become so popular is because it provides entertainment. So it is not a great leap forward in AI or a path to AGI, but instead a incredibly convoluted way of keeping reasonable intelligent people occupied and amused. You enter a prompt, and it returns a result - what a fun game!
Maybe that is it's primary contribution to society.
I use ChatGPT all the time in my software dev job and I find it incredibly helpful. First, it's just much faster than pouring over doc to find the answer you want when you know what you're asking for. Second, when you don't know exactly what you're asking for (i.e. "How would I accomplish X using technology Y"), it's incredibly helpful because it points you to some of the keywords that you should be searching for to find more/corroborate. Third, for some set of tasks (i.e. "write me an example of code that does this") I find it faster to ask ChatGPT to write the code for me first - note this one is the least common of the tasks I use ChatGPT for because I can usually write the code faster.
Yes, I know ChatGPT hallucinates. No, I don't just copy-and-paste the output into my code and press enter. But it saves me a ton of time in some specific areas, and I think that people that don't learn how to use generative AI tools effectively will be at a huge productivity disadvantage.