It’s interesting you mention linguistics because I feel a lot of the discussions around AI come back to early 20th century linguistics debates between Russel, Wittgenstein and later Chomsky. I tend to side with (later) Wittgenstein’s perception that language is inherently a social construct. He gives the example of a “game” where there’s no meaningful overlap between e.g. Olympic Games and Monopoly, yet we understand very well what game we’re talking about because of our social constructs. I would argue that LLMs are highly effective at understanding (or at least emulating) social constructs because of their training data. That makes them excellent at language even without a full understanding of the world.