I totally get the skepticism. It's not surprising given how abused the term "AI" is, but they are a much bigger deal than "a search engine with that robot voice". In fact that's exactly the thing they are definitely NOT. They are terrible at recall and terrible at prioritizing reference information.

That said, Gpt models are the first, possibly most important piece of an AGI. They are a proof of concept that the ability to draw basic conceptual and linguistic understanding is possible from an enormous amount of data and shockingly little instruction. There's no real reason to think they should be as good as they are at correctly interpreting written content, but here we are.

People make a big deal out of gpt because they think it will enable rapid improvement, and personally I don't think that's a forgone conclusion. It's probably appropriate to compare it to the development of the first rudimentary computer: by itself it isn't particularly groundbreaking, but drawn to its maximum it has revolutionary potential. Every additional step from here is likely as big or bigger than the one from gpt2 and to 3 and 4.