not long ago these people would have you believe that a next word predictor trained on reddit posts would somehow lead to artificial general superintelligence
I don't understand why you'd be so dismissive about this. It's looking less likely that it'll end up happening, but is it any less believable than getting general intelligence by training a blob of meat?
I feel like accusing people of being "so dismissive" was strongly associated with NFTs and cryptocurrency a few years ago, and now it's widely deployed against anyone skeptical of very expensive, not very good word generators.
I'm not sure what point you're making. It's true that people, including myself, were dismissive of cryptocurrency a few years ago; I think it's clear at this point that we were wrong, and it's not actually the case that the industry is a Ponzi scheme propped up by scammers like FTX.