>Also the article could be trying to normalize thinking that these are more than matrix multiplication gadgets good at compression.

Honestly, I think it's less so (for some of us) that we think they're "more than matrix multiplication gadgets good at compression", so much as thinking that perhaps what our brains are doing is not so dissimilar.

A materialist view of the world could support the idea that intelligence itself may just be a series of predictions from a big compressed multi-modal dataset. That's not to say that LLMs are doing it in a way that is even close to how our brains are doing it, but we also don't understand how different it may be, and how much utility we can get out of them even with the current architecture.