But also the people who seem to think we need a magic soul to perform useful work is way way too high.

The main problem is Idiots seem to have watched one too many movies about robots with souls and gotten confused between real life and fantasy - especially shitty journalists way out their depth.

This big gotcha 'they don't live upto the hype' is 100% people who heard 'ai' and thought of bad Will Smith movies. LLMs absolutely live upto the actual sensible things people hoped and have exceeded those expectations, they're also incredibly good at a huge range of very useful tasks which have traditionally been considered as requiring intelligence but they're not magically able everything, of course they're not that's not how anyone actually involved in anything said they would work or expected them to work.