Here's the issue - it's not a search assistant. It's a large language model connected to a search engine and roleplaying the role of a search assistant named Bing [Sydney].

LLMS are infinite creative writing engines - they can roleplay as anything from a search engine to your fav waifu insanely well, fooling people into thinking that AIs are self-aware.

They ain't AGI or close to self-awareness, but they're a really tasty illusion of sentience and are insanely creative and super useful for all sorts of work and problem solving, which will inevitably lead us to creating an AGI. The cultural shift and excitement produced by LLMS and the race to improve LLMS and other similar tools will get us to AGIs.

Mere integration of LLM with numerous other tools to make it more responsive and more fun (more memory, wolfram alpha, webcam, recognition of faces, recognition of emotions shown by user, etc) will make it approach an illusion of awareness so satisfying that will be almost impossible to tell whether its self-aware or not.

The biggest issue with robots is uncanny valley. An LLM naturally and nearly completely obliterates uncanny valley because of how well it masquerades as people and roleplays human emotions in conversations. People are already having relationships and falling in love with LLMs (as evidenced by replika and characterai cases), it's just the beginning.

Consider this: An unbound, uncensored LLM can be fine-tuned to be your best friend who understands you better than anyone on the planet because it can roleplay a character that loves exactly the same things as you do to an insane degree of realism.