Absolutely.
We discussed this in the 90s and were of the opinion, then, that event state of the art NNs (in the 90s) wouldn't get much more complex because of their actual mathematical descriptions.
It's all the bells and whistles around managing training, and real-world input/output translation code.
The core or 'general case' always will be tiny.
Frankly, when the total argument against a position consists of such "boo" words, I immediately suspect some projection of personal preferences.
But anyway I googled "intelligence vs embodiment" and found this quite nice summary albeit from 2012: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3512413/
The basic idea seems to be that human conscious experience is a mishmash of sensory-reflexive impulses and internal deliberation, combined into a sophisticated narrative. Simulating this kind of combination may help robots to move about in the world and to relate more closely to human experience. I have a lot of sympathy with this although I'm guarded about how much it really tells us about the potentials for AGI.
> Not least because all the code which is the actual algorithm for generating an LLM is all the code that goes into its data collection which is just being inlined (/cached) with weights.
Could this "data collection" code not potentially be put into a few thousand lines also?
This would mean hardcoding a model of the world. Which maybe, with the help of some breakthrough from physics, would be possibe (but I think the kind of breakthrough needed to get down to such a small size would be a theory of everything). But this means eliminating the self-learning part of current neural networks, which is what makes them attractive: you don't have to hardcode the rules, as the model will be able to learn them.
You seem to be assuming, without any evidence, a narrow view of what embodiment entails.
The "antique superstition" claim is particularly ironic in this context, since it much more clearly applies to your own apparently irrational hasty conclusion.
As a claim, it's antique -- it would easily have been a view of Turing and others many decades ago.
And as a claim its as false then as now. Not least because all the code which is the actual algorithm for generating an LLM is all the code that goes into its data collection which is just being inlined (/cached) with weights.
However, more than that, it's an extremely impoverished view of general intelligence which eliminates any connection between intelligence and a body. All the "lines of code" beyond a single are concerned with I/O and device manipulation.
Thus this is just another way of repeating the antique superstition that intelligence has nothing to do with embodiment.