They are basically an assistant that provides collages of pre-existing information on demand. That is all they do really.
I consider this to be the next generation of search. Which is no small thing.
You forgot to mention they do this unreliably and inaccurately.
It is a better version of search though, much more multi-dimensional and in no small way, a revolutionary piece of technology branch. It's just not AGI, not even close. But we have industry leaders often dropping the G word just to get more hype and funding into this space.
Chinese LLMs are measurably better in many ways (parameters and benchmarking), certainly if you are in the Chinese cultural and internet ecosystem. It's just rare for Chinese AI scientists working in China to consider this avenue as a sure path to AGI. Even the Chinese AI scientists working in the US (and about a quarter of the US AI industry is Chinese) don't claim this but the big wigs (management not engineers) always do. I wonder why.