Good job! I don't have time or patience anymore to read all posts on the site, but I think you deserve it from what I remember

Many regular people will think that AI is just large language models, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. However, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, there are many contexts. For example, maybe you're considering to pay for the ChatGPT API, but what are your use-cases? It's difficult to answer your question without having hands-on experience with the tool and have facts.

I also want to say that some people tend to be afraid of new technologies and play it defensively

Anyway, tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can still be quite stupid and hallucinate and I don't see big improvements or any improvement at all in practice wrt 1 year ago in terms of "intelligence". I use Gemini regularly and so I test it capabilities

In particular, when it comes to novel problems (e.g. not so common coding problems), it's stupid and it usually hallucinates.

But even if it doesn't provide you with the full correct answer, sometimes it can give you some insights on how to actually solve the problem.

But this is true for Google Search or any other search engine

The approach is slightly different, but the utility is similar

But we also need to consider that search engines have been around for longer. We need to see how the LLMs tech and tools evolve. It's possible that in a few years LLMs will actually be the default or they will merge completely with search engines