[SEGyges]

These are fancy Markov chains in the sense that humans are just chemicals and computers just do math. Technically true, but not even "overly reductive"; it is just wrong if it is used to imply that, e.g., humans just swirl around in beakers or the most complex thing you can do with computers is trigonometry.

You can make anything sound unimpressive if you describe it sufficiently poorly.

And: So many different variations are published every month. There are a good number of people in serious research trying approaches that don't use cross entropy loss (ie, strictly next-token prediction).

I don't know what the trajectory of the technology is over the next ten years, but I am positive no one else does either and anyone who thinks they do is wrong.