I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way:

  LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another

Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets. They are essentially fuzzy stores of (primarily third world) labeling effort. The response patterns they give are painstakingly and at massive scale tuned into them by data labelers. The emotional skill mentioned in the article is outsourced employees writing or giving feedback on emotional responses.

So you're not so much talking to statistical model as having a conversation with a Kenyan data labeler, fuzzily adapted through a transformer model to match the topic you've brought up.

While thw distinction doesn't change the substance of the article, it's valuable context and it's important to dispel the idea that training on the internet does this. Such training gives you GPT2. GPT4.5 is efficiently stored low- cost labor.