Well, no... I'm starting to think you may just be intellectually rabid to the point of simply being unreasonable. I certainly never meant to insult you, as a matter of fact I provided us an off-ramp to de-escalation by cracking a joke shared between many in the general IT industry, that being that programmers are very left-brained and literal. Like how sometimes a fault can push past to the point of endearment. However, somewhere in there you heard an insult I guess.
Look, I don't wanna fight with you and we've both got stuff to do today. I walked into a thread, by my perception you were being a huge dick to a stranger, I spoke up. Deep down, I know you probably didn't mean it like that. Most people are intellectually lazy. Nobody looks into AI. Some people think AI's alive. More importantly, it's costing people jobs. It's leading to the erection of massive resource-guzzling data centers. The energy needs for these centers are literally being shoveled onto the commonwealth, sneaking in increased energy bills to everyday households. Believe me, I get it. More than you might let yourself realize.
But that person over in that other thread, they aren't the enemy. People trying to figure themselves out aren't the enemy. And you going around spreading bad juju isn't helping anyone but them. The big THEM. At least that's how I see it.
And because I can tell we are both willful people, I know you know I gotta push back on that lame "backpedal" stuff. There's nothing to backpedal on and no, AI is not "just matrices". If that's true, I challenge you to create a small maybe 1b parameter chat model using "just matrices". The very notion is impossible because a user interface is required and the user interface directly effects the weights on every model, so you cannot replicate the experience without it. Nor could you even instruct it, feed it the knowledge base, or all the other steps along the way. I know I'm being over-literal, but only because you are being over-reductive.
And as for it being alive, that's a very loaded term. Is a cell alive? Or slime mold? To even broach that subject, you have to bring in philosophy and speculation. What I do know, for sure, is that once the generative field is active, there is no code firing. There is no instruction. The AI does it's thing completely autonomously and it's the single greatest mystery of AI technology, admitted publicly by the very people who made it. To ignore that is to disqualify oneself from any sincere debate on the subject.