He's a proponent, but that doesn't mean his analysis isn't useful. It's clear and mostly accurate and when he gets something wrong he makes it right. Does he do all that with rose tinted glasses, probably, but my experience reading him is that he's sharp, thoughtful, and entirely reasonable.
Dismissing the opportunity to learn because the person offering you knowledge is enthusiastic about his area of expertise is probably shortsighted.
I don't think they were being dismissive. They just said they were skeptical, which is generally a good thing. It's certainly better than the goofy hero worship I constantly see on HN.
This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and regenerative braking; what matters is he knows how to operate these machines in their use case at the limits.
Hearing a programming legend weigh in on the latest programming tool seems entirely completely reasonable.
Being an expert in machine learning turns out to not be particularly relevant to being an expert in the applications of LLMs to real-world problems. I'm certainly not an expert in the former but I do think I have credibility in the latter.
Dismissing the opportunity to learn because the person offering you knowledge is enthusiastic about his area of expertise is probably shortsighted.