"LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because they are just a bunch of numbers guessing the next word. They have no linguistic module, so they cannot exhibit cognition". That's the argument. It's pretty clearly stated.

Look, this isn't necessarily directed at you, but I've been a researcher into the theory of deep learning for many years now. I've seen all the phases, heard all the criticism, had to constantly argue against this. Gary Marcus was one of the loudest voices of this argument, but every would-be philosopher came out of the woodwork to explain why LLMs are no more than stochastic parrots because of their design. Geoffrey Hinton famously had to debunk these arguments multiple times.

And now that LLMs start to clearly exhibit intelligent behavior and can be somewhat reliable, now "nobody ever thought that LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because of next-token predictions, or linear algebra, etc."? No, that's not okay.