> which harkened to sci-fi characters like Data or GLaDOS.

There's a truth in there: Today's chatbots literally are characters inside a modern fictional sci-fi story! Some regular code is reading the story, acting out the character's lines, we humans are being tricked into thinking there's a real entity somewhere.

The real LLM is just a Make Document Longer machine. It never talks to anybody, and has no ego, and it sits in back being fed documents that look like movie-scripts. These documents are prepped to contain fictional characters, such as a User (whose lines are text taken unwittingly from a real human) and a Chatbot with incomplete lines.

The Chatbot character is a fiction, because you can simply change its given name to Vegetarian Dracula and suddenly it gains a penchant for driving its fangs into tomatoes.

> The new "reasoning" or "chain of thought" AIs are similarly just a bunch of conventional LLM inputs and outputs stacked on top of each other.

Continuing that framing: They've changed the style of movie script to film noir, where the fictional character is making a parallel track of unvoiced remarks.

While this helps keep the story from going off the rails, it doesn't mean a qualitative leap in any "thinking" going on.

I know this is true, and I like your perspective.