It is dangerous because it completely fails to grasp or convey what these systems might be capable of.

The point is that when you build a system with the level of internal complexity that LLMs have, they tend to have emergent properties that are not well-described by a naive and/or low level description of their operation. You will not understand what contemporary "ordinary" computers do or are used for if you think of them as only a series of silicon semiconductor transistors, even thought that is undoubtedly what they are.

We don't yet really know what the right level is to understand the behavior we see from LLMs, but I'd wager "just a probabilistic database" is not it.

Because we aren’t discussing capability; we are discussing what LLMs “think” of Humanity and its “flaws”. Calling a model a glorified text file of floating point numbers for probabilistic matrix multiplication is technically correct, and helps to strip this veneer that it is a consciousness with its own thoughts, which many articles (including the one linked IMO) want you to think. LLMs are naturally far more capable than what their nature or that description implies, but we see that every day, particularly on HN. Just as everyone knows how to work the basic functions of a computer, and most people treat computers as magic black boxes rather than treated sand formed into logic gates encased in plastic, which helps to bring them back in line with mundanity.

LLMs are plenty capable, and they are dramatically shaking up various fields, but that’s not important to the conversation you responded to. If you were talking from a general view that reductionist statements fail to address capabilities I wouldn’t say anything (outside of a hearty “that’s by design”), but you claimed they were missing the “point”. I think they understood the point of the topic thoroughly, and would say you’re missing the trees for the forest; focusing so heavily on the broader implications, that you miss the finer nuance in conversation.