I’ve been making the same or similar arguments you are here in a lot of places. I use LLMs every day for my job, and it’s quite clear that beyond a certain scale, there’s definitely more going on than “fancy autocomplete.”
I’m not sure what’s up with people hating on AI all of a sudden, but there seems quite a few who are confidently giving out incorrect information. I find it most amusing when they’re doing that at the same time as bashing LLMs for also confidently giving out wrong information.