Just my small sample size of the people I interact with outside work (no engineers think AI is actually general AI) lots of people think AI is some 2001 Hal level intelligence.

the university probably got paid

Never underestimate management’s ability to do stupid shit (like paying for this) in the name of “the future”.

They were gonna pay for a speaker anyway.

if you know how they work llms are obviously not general ai.

but people are really bad at understanding how technology works especially with intangible stuff like computer programs.

scifi has covered ai for years, and now there is software that can mostly convincingly generate sentences.

people that understand both, see the very different approaches.

but people that don't only see the almost convincing results.

That one in particular is actually a relatively old project made to not only talk but look and move, and make facial expressions like a human. It's called Sophia by Hanson robotics. It might've gotten a bit better at chatting with people thanks to LLMs but it is old (they revamp the servos and skin every so often). They use it as a research platform for human robot interaction. It was on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show 7 years ago.