> LLMs are just another abstraction layer above programming languages, machine language, etc.

Programming languages are (largely) deterministic. LLMs are not. The boundary between an abstract concept and something executable sits comfortably in the mind of the programmer in non-LLM contexts. This boundary shifts when using an LLM and becomes shared between the programmer and the matrix multiplication machine.

The "layer of abstraction" analogy is therefore technically true but essentially false. "Just another" papers over how seismic of a paradigm shift all of this is.