Its not an assumption, it is a fact about how computers function today. LLMs interpolate, they do not extrapolate. Nobody has shown a method to get them to extrapolate. The insistence to the contrary involves an unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

As long as agnosticism is the attitude, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t let mythology about human intelligence/computational capacity stop us from making progress toward that end.

> unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

For me this isn’t an assumption, it’s a corollary that follows from the Church-Turing thesis.