Addition and multiplication are trivially implemented using lookup, if you had a machine without arithmetic and only control flow and memory operations. You don't need much more than that for matrix operations, and now you have ChatGPT, a decent simulation of apparent thinking - which is all that is necessary to kill the intuition dead.

Not seeing how matrix operations == thinking, which was the point of the thought experiment.

What is thinking if not a series of matrix operations? Your brain is just a huge network of neurons and their connections, is this not a (very complex) matrix?

Certainly not in any mathematical sense. The discrete N-dimensional coefficients of a matrix are not modeled by neurons, their connections, and the quantum mechanical electrical accidents that (a) constitute one's wetware, and (b) aren't completely captured by gates and code.

The map is still not the territory, sorry.