I understand the charge, but it's soemwhat unfair. It's more like we start to see a correspondence which even 20 years ago was barely considered

It's also not the first time a breakthrough technology was compared to the human brain/mind, but we also know biologically animal nervous systems are not digital computers, telephone/telegraph networks or hydraulic systems.

I'm not saying LLMs work in the same way as us. But a few years ago humans used to be the only competent users of language on the planet. Now its humans + LLMs who are competent users of langauge. This is a big change, and I'm saying that it might be pointing to something deeper about complexity and how approaches to deal with complexity arise in the universe.

sure, but its facile to dismiss these breakthroughs as naive metaphors. physicans do understand now many bodily systems can be modeled with the same tools an engineer will model his machines. its not because these abstractions are incomplete, they are wrong.

Even if you just consider LLMs to be stochastic parrots, its still a blow to humans, as in 'a sufficiently sophisticated stochastic parrot can actually be fairly capable'. Its like Searle's Chinese Room suddenly arrives and turns out to be pretty handy at office jobs. Its a significant change.