The thing is AI is already "good" for a lot of things. It all depends on your definition of "good" and what you require of an AI model.

It can do a lot of things that are generally very effective. High reliability semantic parsing from images is just one thing that modern LLM's are very reliable at.

Wouldn’t you say that now, finally, what people call AI combines subsymbolic systems („gradient descent“) with search and with symbolic systems (tool calls)?

I had a professor in AI who was only working on symbolic systems such as SAT-solvers, Prolog etc. and the combination of things seems really promising.

Oh, and what would be really nice is another level of memory or fast learning ability that goes beyond burning in knowledge through training alone.

> It seems like the industry is just trying to do a cool parlor trick in convincing the masses this is somehow AI from science fiction.

If you gave a random sci-fi writer from 1960s access to Claude, I'm fairly sure they wouldn't have any doubts over whether it is AI or not. They might argue about philosophical matters like whether it has a "soul" etc (there's plenty of that in sci-fi), but that is a separate debate.