I think it's about as big a breakthrough as that "wormhole" they made with a quantum computer. That is, 99% hype.
It somehow gets more empathy than many humans but the answers are frequently convincing bullshit. If it replaces the likes of Donald Trump, L. Ron Hubbard and Sam Bankman-Fried it may be a very good thing. It might be able to run Twitter better than Elon Musk.
Remember that ChatGPT is only as good as its data, and the data it has is the "wisdom of crowds" sourced from public sentiment on the internet. If you ask it something? The answer you get will always be the "common-sense" answer that a room full of people would also come up with. It lacks outside-the-box thinking.
undefined
It's like a big zip archive of all the content it's seen, with a "fuzzy grep" feature built in.
It's a breakthrough maybe the way iPhone was a breakthrough (but to a far lesser degree IMO). It's not doing anything previously inconceivable, it's just doing it in a more polished way with some more hype. Of course that can make all the difference. From a research perspective though it doesn't mean much