* LLMs provide a mirage: there is really nothing there at all, but they sometimes can look like they are exhibiting intelligence but that's because they are repeating statistically-remixed intelligent input.
* However, the tech-bro culture that has fermented in Silicon Valley has resulted in a large bunch of people who are irrational, have no concern for logic or truth, but who feed on each other's groupthink, and from that culture, a religious-like mindset has emerged -- strongly reflected in some of the comments here, for what it's worth -- that is basically a sort of messianic cult. It preaches:
- greed is good, etc. (Wall St, Gordon Gekko etc.)
- disrupt, automate humans out of the loop, etc: these are good things, desirable goals in and of themselves, the ends justify the means, etc.
- truth is negotiable and not really important; cf. "the reality based community" (https://archive.ph/pvkxE etc.)
- thus they honestly don't know and can't care if LLMs are smart, because LLMs manifest the dogma: the machine will evolve and replace us, etc.
Summary: it's an economics-driven religious movement now, with True Believers, and mere facts do not matter to them, and what to sane people would be horrifically disastrous outcomes are to these guys desirable outcomes, prices worth paying on the path to the Singularity.
Those are positions, but you need arguments to back up your positions. I know this is an advertisement, but couldn't she put in at least a few so we can sample her reasoning quality?
Well, it's not my article, so I have no particular position on this, but it seems to me that her assessment largely agreed with my own, so perhaps I am merely parroting her views through mine.
To me, the article seemed to express her position pretty well. YMMV. But maybe that's because I agree with it, and you presumably do not.
It's just woolly. Don't philosophers talk about causal models and mental states and simulations and China brains and aspects of externalism instead of just saying "I think AI researchers are wrong, I think it's like this instead"?
If the field accepts that it can't describe or define what consciousness is then any competent practitioner in that field will go out of their way to avoid saying that an entity, or class of entities -- such as LLM bots -- do not possess it.
To do anything else would be to lay themselves open to attack. It would be a career-threatening move.
Not being able to say "this type of software is not conscious" makes it necessary to beat around the bush somewhat in trying to say what amounts to "this type of software cannot think".
I don't know what you perceive as "woolly" here, but it could be due to that.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852