“When you ask a question, these models interpret what it means, determine what its response should mean, then translate that back into words — if that’s not a definition of general intelligence, what is?” said Jerry Kaplan, a longtime A.I. entrepreneur and the author of “Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

Mr. Kaplan said he was skeptical about such highly heralded wonders as self-driving cars and cryptocurrency. He approached the latest A.I. boom with the same doubts but said he had been won over.

“If this isn’t ‘the Singularity,’ it’s certainly a singularity: a transformative technological step that is going to broadly accelerate a whole bunch of art, science and human knowledge — and create some problems,” he said.

Critics counter that even the impressive results of L.L.M.s are a far cry from the enormous, global intelligence long promised by the Singularity. Part of the problem in accurately separating hype from reality is that the engines driving this technology are becoming hidden. OpenAI, which began as a nonprofit using open source code, is now a for-profit venture that critics say is effectively a black box. Google and Microsoft also offer limited visibility.

Much of the A.I. research is being done by the companies with much to gain from the results. Researchers at Microsoft, which invested $13 billion in OpenAI, published a paper in April concluding that a preliminary version of the latest OpenAI model “exhibits many traits of intelligence” including “abstraction, comprehension, vision, coding” and “understanding of human motives and emotions.”