Since yours was the first reply I came to that didn’t just ‘react’, I’d like to challenge 1 point in your list (the rest I pretty much agree with), and that is the first one. For context, I worked in AI (or ML as it was known then) in the 1990s. The models were very much based on ideas from neuroscience (my CS PhD supervisor was a biologist). Saying “they can’t think” requires a precise definition of what “thinking” is, and I’ve not seen one so far.

For sure, the most current LLMs are not what we might call human-level sentient, and have only seen a fraction of what a human baby would be exposed to in terms of training data. But as far as the way they process that data, perhaps they are “thinking” in the same way a brain would think if all it ever ‘saw’ was text. Perhaps they think in the same way an insect or small rodent thinks. And as they grow larger / more sophisticated, the same as a dog or cat? Or a small primate? You can see where that’s going.

Anyway, I enjoyed The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby. My PhD was based on the early work of Yann LeCun, and putting all those names and the motivations behind them into a full picture was eye-opening.