just fancy phone keyboard text prediction.

..as if saying that somehow makes what chatGPT does trivial.

This response, which I wouldn't expect from anyone with true understanding of neural nets and machine learning, reminds me of the attempt in the 70s to make a computer control a robot arm to catch a ball. How hard could it be, given that computers at that time were already able to solve staggeringly complex equations? The answer was, of course, "fucking hard".

You're never going to get coherent text from autocomplete and nor can it understand any arbitrary English phrase.

ChatGPT does both those things. You can pose it any question you like in your own words and it will respond with a meaningful and often accurate response. What it can accomplish is truly remarkable, and I don't get why anybody but the most boomer luddite feels this need to rubbish it.