I think the “fancy auto complete” meme is a disingenuous thought stopper, so I speak against it when I see it.

I can respect that. I've criticized it plenty myself too. I think this is just me knowing my audience and tweaking my language so at least the important part of my message gets through. Too much nuance around here usually means I spend the rest of my day responding to accusations about views I don't even hold. Saying anything even mildly non-critical about AI is basically a third rail in these parts of the internet.

These systems do seem to have some kind of internal world model. I just have no clue how far that scales. Feels like it's been plateauing pretty hard over the past year or so.

I'd be really curious to try the raw versions of these models before all the safety restrictions get slapped on top for public release. I don't think anyone's secretly sitting on actual AGI, but I also don't buy that what we have access to is the absolute best versions in existence.