Comment by Matumio

This is like saying with chemistry, amino acids and human DNA you now have the basis to understand human culture.

The problem is one of complexity, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Electrical engineering creates a thinking that is opposite to what you need for understanding biology or human culture.

This is relevant because LLMs have basically swallowed all written human culture. Engineering is about creating parts that interact in a clean, well-defined way, like a MOSFET transistor or a REST API. The goal is that that when you combine the parts, and they all operate within specs, you can still predict what the whole system will do.

So saying LLMs are just a step away from the Pereceptron (or an equivalent filter) is mathematically true, but almost useless. It's like saying that a modern 3D game is basically just transistors, logic, CPUs and memory, nevermind the pattern in that memory or how it came to be. You really can't ignore all the cultural inputs and feedback loops if you want any kind of useful understanding what this thing is.