Wet Bags of Atoms Teaching Sand to Think

I see a particular type of AI dismissal permeating social media, especially on Bluesky, that deserves closer examination. Variations on the theme: AI is "just a glorified search engine," "fancy autocomplete," "just next-token prediction," or my personal favorite, "teaching sand to think." The technical descriptions aren't entirely wrong. Large language models do, at a mechanical level, predict the next token in a sequence.