Comment by throw310822

> science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency

Huh? I don't think it's true at all- HAL passes the Turing test and is effectively more capable than his human colleagues. What they could not see was the complexity of the technology around it- programmable computers everywhere, each running tons of extremely complicated software, everything networked.

Instead, what most science fiction got wrong (and I got entirely wrong myself before LLMs) is that the technology is a consumer technology. Inference is cheap enough that it can be served to millions almost for free. The famous machines of SF (HAL, Colossus, WOPR from War Games, SkyNet, etc.) are all dedicated systems in some inaccessible laboratory, in service of a single client and working at some multiple of human speed. What we got instead is as many instances as we want, directly available to anyone.