theory: there are two groups that a lot of hackernews commenters fall into. And these two groups clash on every Ai post every day. One camp only uses Ai to write code and thinks of them strictly as LLMs with a clearly understood design and purpose but that show some surprising behavior, they've watched youtube videos that show how everything ties together computationally and mathematically, from neural nets to RL, etc. and dont see them as capital A, Ai. It's another tool in the toolbox, and thinking about them in the way you describe, as something closer to capital Ai would cause severe cognitive dissonance, akin to the idea that a hammer could hop out of the toolbox and start building a house. Even though what you've done is just take one small step of critical thinking, it would be a leap to the other camp members, who are themselves, quite technical thinkers.