Because to the general public, LLMs are an example of Clarke's Third Law. Most folks, who are not remotely close to even a basic understanding of how LLMs operate at a technical level and only view their output cannot possibly evaluate what they're experiencing other than to believe it's conscious, alive, and/or magic.

Most people on Earth try to put what they're seeing into the context of what they understand; mental gymnastics to try and understand what is happening based on their prior experience. They have absolutely 0 understanding of how it works under the hood so, to them, it must be alive.

> a basic understanding of how LLMs operate at a technical level

An LLM with CoT is Turing-complete. Training is, basically, compression (the training data gets lossily compressed into the model's weights). The information-theoretic limit of compression is an algorithm that reproduces functionality of a system that produced the training data.

No "magic" is required to get to a system that reproduces at least some facets of the human brain functionality.

Three years ago I was skeptical that stochastic gradient descent (and other known techniques) are the way. But evidence kept piling up.

And this apparently also applies to many HN users, many of whom should know better.