How can you so confidently proclaim that? Hinton and Ilya Sutskever certainly seem to think that LLMs do think. I'm not saying that you should accept what they say blindly due to their authority in the field, but their opinions should give your confidence some pause at least.
>How can you so confidently proclaim that?
Do you know why they're called 'models' by chance?
They're statistical, weighted models. They use statistical weights to predict the next token.
They don't think. They don't reason. Math, weights, and turtles all the way down. Calling anything an LLM does "thinking" or "reasoning" is incorrect. Calling any of this "AI" is even worse.
Sure, they were evolved using criteria based on next token prediction. But you were also evolved, only using critera for higher reproduction.
So are you really thinking, or just trying to reproduce?
You are implicitly assuming that no statistical model acting on next-token prediction can, conditional on context, replicate all of the outputs that a human would give. This is a provably false claim, mathematically speaking, as human output under these assumptions would satisfy the conditions of Kolmogorov existence.
However, the status quo is that "AI" doesn't exist, computers only ever do exactly what they are programmed to do, and "thinking/reasoning" wasn't on the table.
I am not the one that needs to disprove the status quo.
If it really was that simple to dismiss the possibility of "AI", no one would be worried about it.