[FleurBouquet]

This is really a problem with our linguistic use of the word "just" and the philosophical misunderstandings it creates.

A tornado is just wind. To argue a tornado is just wind though is really a rhetorical device to downplay a tornado. We are almost never searching for the truth with the word "just" in this way.

To argue chatGPT is JUST a probabilistic next token generator is exactly downplay its emergent properties. This shouldn't be terribly surprising since it is not like undergrads have to take a class in complex systems. I can remember foolishly thinking 15 years ago that the entire field of complex systems was basically a bogus subject. chatGPT clearly has scaling properties that you can't really say it is JUST a probabilistic next token generator. chatGPT is the emergent properties of the system as a whole.