Neural networks do not think
Obviously they don't "speak" either. Both "think" and "speak" are used as shorthands here for what the language models actually do.
If an AI can do that, it's not going to matter whether or not it meets your arcane definition of "thinking".
Progress of scientific theory is plain to see. At each step, e.g. Kepler equations -> Newtonian mechanics -> General relativity, we encode our observations of the physical world ever more efficiently.
Yeah, something about "abstraction" and some hand-wavy magic, which computers are already doing.
Can you state, specifically, what part of thinking you presume computers can't do?
Is this semantics?
One neuron doesn't think. Three neurons don't think. Billions of neurons think. Somewhere between one neuron and billions of neurons, thinking starts happening. Probably also true for neural networks. The main problem is that people throw around terms like: "Thought", "Intelligence", "Will", "Reasoning", "Knowledge", "Consciousness", etc like they are very well defined and well understood terms and they very much are not.
It's all semantics.
Depends on what you mean by thinking in that particular case.
In my opinion what LLMs do is close enough to thinking for some definition of the word.
And, by the way, I think there's no need to be unpleasant to state your point.
The thing that's special about these operations is that they deal with immaterial concepts. What's right? What's good? What's true? And so on. Computers have never achieved this and they never will, because they are only material arrangements, and so can only handle things on the material level. The human mind is clearly not reducible to that, because it can handle purely immaterial concepts.
Given that, we could never agree. But that's fine.
And by the way, I actually hope you're right.