I agree with your perspective overall but I find when something like this is posted the responses are usually along the lines of "how do we know that statistica

I agree with your perspective overall but I find when something like this is posted the responses are usually along the lines of "how do we know that statistical prediction on a large enough scale is not akin to understanding?" Which to me is a somewhat lazy retort but highlights that one huge issue in this field is not really having definitions or an understanding of our own about what we are debating, and that we can't rely on saying "X is not Y" to dispel hype because at our current level of rigor around definitions, someone can just as easily say "nuh uh, X is Y". For me the biggest indicator that something is still missing, and a reason not mentioned here, is the lack of any killer app besides general chatbots and code completion, even more than a year out from their explosion onto the scene (at which point both of those use cases already existed). It was assumed that the LLMs would quickly change everything but it appears their seemingly-minor limitations are pretty fundamental for many use cases.