I think that's overly dismissive of it. GPT-3 for me represents the very beginnings of breaking out of the paradigm of a specialized machine learning system for each task. GPT-3 is alternatively a (surprisingly good and consistent) machine translating system, a (disappointingly mediocre) calculator, a (very uneven with flashes of brilliance) chatbot, etc. All without special engineering to do any of those things. I can't think of any other system I have access to that does that.

Regardless of whether you think GPT-3 represents a track towards true AGI, this is a huge advance! Even OpenAI's API for it is astounding compared to other APIs. I can't think of any other API that amounts to "provide an English language description of your task" and returns an answer. Like I said, the results are still quite uneven, but the fact that it's not extraordinarily outlandish to provide such an API is absolutely mind-boggling to me.

I don't think I could have ever imagined such an API existing even just 5 years ago!

This is way way beyond even the same qualitative thing as ELIZA.

Interesting. I would love to see two people who disagree about this topic have this conversation without using the words "semantic", "syntactic", "symbolic", "know", "meaning", "understand" or "think(ing)". When you boil it down to predicting what the thing can and cannot, or might and might not be able to do. If it can tell you that fire his hot, and hot things burn, burning hurts, and that a person might want to avoid fire because it's hot and they might get burned ... I don't think I care if "anybody is home" or what have you.

I also think it's important to consider my favorite question, "What is the easiest accomplishment you confident AI will not be able to achieve in the next two years?" At least then the goalposts are in place.

GPT-3 is a complete opposite of ELIZA. It's a statistical model that learns from data. ELIZA is just a clever parser with a bunch of hardcoded explicit rules.