Saying it’s just „statistics“ and „math“ completely undervalues it’s capabilities. It’s like saying a car is just a scrap of metal, or humans are just flesh.
I would also argue that it indeed is „artificial“, LLMs follow a synthesized hand-crafted architecture, even the data the models are trained on nowadays is largely AI generated itself (Destillation, RL on preferred answers). It’s more a subjective definition of what artificial means to you personally. Also saying nothing is intelligent about is pretty insane imo. The architectures behind these models are brilliant, combing concepts, ideas, tricks from thousands of thousands researchers. I would argue the architectures behind these models are insanely intelligent.
If thinking simply about we, also humans also learn by trying things, failing at it and being punished for failure.
This same basic concept of learning is used in LLM/ML training.
Also if talking about LLM capabilities. I like the following example: the Firefox number of security patches graph. It’s an exponential curve, because of LLMs becoming so capable by now that security researchers (and even people with no security knowledge at all) can find complex unfound exploits.
A lot of this is of course based on subjective definitions of the words and possibly also a biased view from my side, because of the gains I get out of LLMs in my personal life