This is a distinction that only matters if you're having a philosophical argument, but the claim I'm addressing from this article isn't philosophical.

It is a practical distinction. An engine is not a car.

For a mechanic, that's a practical distinction. For most people, it isn't.

I don’t see people driving engines around, since that is impossible. You actually need the rest of the car around the engine to have it function as a drivable vehicle.

It is a pretty practical distinction.

Of course. But most people don't buy an engine, ever. They don't have one laying around. They buy a whole car, every time.

So, since apparently I may need to clarify my actual point: For most people, an LLM-plus-agent-harness is just "LLM" or "AI". If you're trying to build one, you care about the distinction. Ditto if you're a pedant. But most people are not either of those things.

We aren’t doing the general public any favors by blurring these distinctions. People can mostly understand that a car usually has an engine, but in this context people can’t tell how the box is moving.

the most widely used API surfaces are already shaped around chat, it's different and most analogies will fall short in some way

Neither a chat or an API are an LLM.

LLM's have chat templates that sit at the lowest levels of how we feed tokens to them. It's quite integral to how they are trained to process tokens and rises up through the tech stack.

Go to a huggingface repo, look at the files, they have a literal chat_template.jinja

Are you saying an engine with a steering rack is a car?

By that standard Gebru was also not writing about LLMs in the Stochastic Parrot paper.