2 years ago a machine that understands natural language and is capable of any arbitrary, free-form logic or problem solving was pure science fiction. I'm baffled by this kind of dismissal tbh.
>but LLMs are never going to go into a recursive loop of self-improvement
never is a long time.
For example, take this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022
It's a text RPG game built on top of GPT-2 that could follow arbitrary instructions. It was a full project with custom training for something that you can get with a single prompt on ChatGPT nowadays, but it clearly showcased what LLMs were capable of and things we take for granted now. It was clear, back then, that at some point ChatGPT would happen.