I really don’t understand this perspective

This is honestly a strange thing to say. The only examples we have on the planet today of what we consider true intelligence are living animals. Why wouldn't it at least be possible that the properties of the signaling units that comprise these existing, observed intelligences (i.e. neurons) are fundamental to the task of replicating these intelligences? It seems to me it's the "statistical methods" that have yet to prove they're capable of producing true intelligence.

I will retreat to the fact that I said "true AI can be achieved by more accurate simulation of how real neurons and real neural networks function" and not "can only be achieved". Time will tell which approach works better.

I don't know who Chollet is but I'll look him up. Thanks for the reference.

Edit: the downvote was predictable. Nice job.

LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.

yes, absolutely. and? Still makes them AI. Just not AGI (what the tech bros think they sell).

Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.

yes, and? You described an algorithm. If used in the context of game AI, it falls into the category of AI. The same way an LLM falls also the broad definition of AI. It's just not AGI

This is exactly the stupid sematic discussion I mentioned above. You are fighting the wrong fight. Start focusing on calling their bullshit for not being AGI. That's something you can actually attack. Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error. And weakins your argument

This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.

With the exact state of training data, and the exact prompt history, you'll get the same output. Problem is that you only get this scenario a single time. And as much as a spelling error, or simply repeating the same prompt twice, will not yield deterministic output.

So no, LLM garbage is not deterministic. Otherwise it would be possible to predict output before the matrix processes the input.

They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.

This almost perfectly describes human behavior.

That's nonsense. Most mammals have a high understanding of context, and humans are very much able to produce deterministic answers to a given problem.