Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...
Even opening a book for 1 hour over being online makes a world of a difference. It feels like your mind is being exploited from all angles to entering a tranquil state.
It is not really about graphics as it is about the scale of a game. Many studios don't even create their own custom engines like they used to to push the most out of hardware and use Unreal Engine. Games take long now because they are much larger in scope and are typically open world. Even the sequel to Breath of the Wild took 6 years and the graphics aren't exactly staggering but the scope of these games have improved a lot which isn't a bad thing. You can get lost in some for dozens of hours. I would imagine studios like From Software even enjoy the ambition of creating games like Elden Ring.
>We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says
No, some places are quite literally a scam or somewhere you can get food poisoning. I find higher signal in 1 star reviews and avoid these places as there is a real cost not just subjective experience.
Technology is what you make of it. If you want to make it your best friend and your only friend, that's your choice. But I would guess more people would use it as a personal tutor. If it works as well as the demo, this already crushes most language learning apps. Actually the only apps for learning language that it would fail to replace would still be Tandem and HelloTalk because it still can't replicate the nuance of real human interaction.
Let me repeat: They are about to annex a sovereign nation while reducing the capital city to rubble. May or may not remind you of another country further north.