A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

In many discussions where questions of “alignment” or “AI safety” crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities. In one of these discussions, somebody correctly called me out on the simplistic nature of this argument - “a brain is just some proteins and currents”. I…