which is fine. the bigger topic is, could you leave a religion if the priest's powers were real*, even if the organization itself was questionable?

*real as in generally held to be real by all the major institutions in the world you are in. Most world governments and stock market investors are investing in AI, they believe they will get an ROI somehow.

This pattern shows up often when people are trying to criticize tesla or spaceX. And yeah, if you measure "current reality" vs "promises of their hype man/lead shitposter and internet troll", absolutely. Tesla probably will never achieve full self driving using anything like their current approach. But if you compare Tesla "to other automakers, "to most automakers that ever existed"", or SpaceX to "any rocket company since 1970" there's no comparison. If you're going to compare the internet to pre-internet, compare it to BBS you would access via modem or fax machines or libraries. No comparison.

Similarly you should compare GPT-4 and the next large model to be released, Gemini, vs all AI software for all time. It's no comparison.

They also hyped autonomous cars and the Internet itself including streaming video for years before it was practical. Your filter of "it's all hype" only works 99 percent of the time.

Consider a flying saucer cult. Clearly a cult, great leader, mothership coming to pick everyone up, things will be great.

...What if telescopes show a large object decelerating into the solar system, the flaw from the matter annihilation engine clearly visible. You can go pay $20 a month and rent a telescope and see the flare.

The cult uh points out their "sequences" of writings by the Great Leader and some stuff is lining up with the imminent arrival of this interstellar vehicle.

My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it, many OpenAI employees post there etc. If the imminent arrival of AI is fake - like the hyped idea of bitcoin going to infinity or replacing real currency, or NFTs - that would be one thing. But I mean, pay $20 a month and man this tool seems to be smart, what could it do if it could learn from it's mistakes and had the vision module deployed...

Oh and I guess the other plot twist in this analogy : the Great Leader is saying the incoming alien vehicle will kill everyone, tearing up his own Sequences of rants, and that's actually not a totally unreasonable outcome if you could see an alien spacecraft approaching earth.

And he's saying to do stupid stuff like nuke each other so the aliens will go away and other unhinged rants, and his followers are eating it up.