For me one major aspect of this “debate” is that the people who see or espouse what I see as over extensions of the abilities of technologies are the ones most unfamiliar with it.

There is an old bit of unscrupulous advice that if someone over assumes your abilities that you should refrain from correcting them.

That is, it benefits the NSA that people think they are actively recording all of their conversations all the time because it forces compliance without the necessary competence, but the people who hold these opinions are often wholly ignorant of the kind of technology required to achieve that level of surveillance.

Have you built your own minigpt? Have you implemented rudimentary transformers?

Are you projecting your desires onto something wholly unworthy of your devotion?

Because the people behind these things are financially incentivized to nod along as your impart more ability than what they know they put into them.

For clarity, my “religion” is math. I believe existence fundamentally is a mathematical construct and as such so are all of its creations.

The brain is to me a mathematical byproduct, but even still, when I familiarized myself with the math of llms and their abilities I recognized that they fall short of being, simulating, or explaining the former.

Llms are stochastic next token pickers, full stop.

Any perceived “intelligence” is projection and anthropomorphising by the agent using them.

I saw a comment on here in another thread stating that the capacity for coherent use of language falls short of being evidence of “intelligence” as children show signs of human “intelligence” long before they can form coherent sentences.