Comment by esailija

There is more than molecules, neurons and synapses. They are made from lower level stuff that we have no idea about (well, we do in this instance but you get the point). They are just higher level things that are useful to explain and understand some things but don't describe or capture the whole thing. For that you would need to go to lower and lower level and so far it seems they go on infinitely. Currently we are stuck at the quantum level, that doesn't mean it's the final level.

OTOH, an LLM is just a token prediction engine. It fully and completely covers it. There is no lower level secrets hidden in the design nobody understands, because it could not have been created if there was. The fact that the output can be surprising is not evidence of anything, we have always had surprising outputs like funny bugs or unexpected features. Using the word "emergence" for this is just deceitful.

This algorithm has fundamental limitations and they have not been getting better, if you look closely. For instance you could vibe code a C compiler now, but it's 80% there, cute trick but not usable in real world. Just like anything, it cannot be economically vibe coded to 100%. They are not going back and vibe coding the previous simpler projects to 100% with "improved" models. Instead they are just vibe coding something bigger to 80%. This is not an improvement in limitations, it is actually communicating between the lines that the limitations cannot be overcome.

Also, enshittification has not even started yet.