The thing is, achieving say, 99.99999% reliable AI would be spectacularly useful even if it's a dead end from the AGI perspective.

People routinely conflate the "useful LLMs" and "AGI", likely because AGI has been so hyped up, but you don't need AGI to have useful AI.

It's like saying the Internet is dead end because it didn't lead to telepathy. It didn't, but it sure as hell is useful.

It's beneficial to have both discussions: whether and how to achieve AGI and how to grapple with it, and how to improve a reliability, performance and cost of LLMs for more prosaic use cases.

It's just that they are separate discussions.