So, to reiterate my example: you'd have been fine with people claiming in 2019 that we would eventually scale LLMs to the capabilities of Opus 4.7 + Claude Code? Because I would have said then that was a fantasy, because "LLMs are just statistical pattern matchers." But I was wrong and I changed my opinion. (Or do you not think the current SoTA LLMs are impressive? If so I can't help you and this discussion won't go anywhere fruitful.)

You're applying an old ~2022 model of LLMs, based on pretraining ("they just predict the next token") and before the RLVR training revolution. "It’s a statistical memorization / information compression machine... nothing more" is cope in 2026, sorry. You can keep telling yourself that, but please at least recognize serious people don't believe that any more. "Emergent behavior" captures a genuine phenomenon and widely recognized in the industry. It surprised me and I was willing to change my opinions about it and I think a little humility and curiosity is warranted here rather than simply reiterating 2022 points about LLMs being statistical token generators. Yes, we know. The math isn't that hard. But there is a lot more to them than just the architecture, and reasoning from architecture to general claims that they can never embody intelligence is a trap.