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When someone writes something like that, I can only assume they haven’t touched a LLM apart from chatgpt3.5 back in 2022. Have you not used Gemini 2.5 pro? O3? Claude 4 Opus?
LLMs aren’t artificial super intelligence, sure. They can’t reason very well, they make strange logic errors and assumptions, they have problems with context length even today.
And yet, this single piece of software can write poems, draw pictures, write computer programs, translate documents, provide advice on countless subjects, understand images, videos and audio, roleplay as any character in any scenario. All of this to a good enough degree that millions of people use them every single day, myself included.
I’ve basically stopped directly using Google search and switched to Gemini as the middle man - the search grounding feature is very good, and you can always check its source. For programming, hallucination isn’t an issue when you can couple it with a linter or make it see the output of a program and correct itself. I wouldn’t trust it on its own and you have to know its limitations, but properly supervised, it’s an amazingly capable assistant.
Sure, you can craft a convincing technical argument on how they’re just stochastic parrots, or find well credentialed people saying how they just regurgitate their training data and are theoretically incapable of creating any new output. You can pull a Gary Marcus and come up with new gotchas and make the LLMs say blatant nonsense in response to specific prompts. Eppur si muove.
I am not interested in debating the object level truth of this topic. I have engaged in such debates previously, and I found the arguments others put forward unpersuasive (as, I assume, they found mine). I'm not trying to convince @self_made_human that he's wrong about LLMs, that would be a waste of both our time. I was trying to point out to him that however much he thinks he is critical of LLMs (and to his credit he did provide receipts to back it up), that is not how his posts come off to observers (or at least, not to me).
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