It’s totally unclear a priori that more R&D in AI is good. There is already a ton of money being poured into it. If you’re in research, it is one of the few things you can be get money for at the moment, and it’s leading to a high degree of uniformity in research output. There’s no reason to expect that “more AI” = “solution to climate change”. “Look at this cool AI stuff, please give us money to solve climate change” is faulty reasoning (but good enough to get money now, thanks to how checked out people are).
But I do agree that continuing the AI hype is the name of the game for places like OpenAI at this point, and how good ChatGPT actually is is beside the point.
If instead we are going to rely on miracles, maybe we should further develop AI to work on these miracles.
It’s sort of irrelevant how good ChatGPT is, the entire benefit is that it will bring more R&D into the field.