Thanks for writing this so clearly... I hear wrong/misguided arguments like we see hear every day from friends, colleagues, "experts in the media" etc.
It's strange because just a moment of thinking will show that such ideas are wrong or paint a clearly incomplete picture. And there's plenty of analogies to the dangers of such reductionism. It should be obviously wrong to anyone who has at least tried ChatGPT.
My only explanation is that a denial mechanism must be at play. It simply feels more comfortable to diminish LLM capabilities and/or feel that you understand them from reading a Medium article on transformer-network, than to consider the consequences in terms of the inner black-box nature.
It's strange because just a moment of thinking will show that such ideas are wrong or paint a clearly incomplete picture. And there's plenty of analogies to the dangers of such reductionism. It should be obviously wrong to anyone who has at least tried ChatGPT.
My only explanation is that a denial mechanism must be at play. It simply feels more comfortable to diminish LLM capabilities and/or feel that you understand them from reading a Medium article on transformer-network, than to consider the consequences in terms of the inner black-box nature.