Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that LLMs are hardly sapient, it's very hard to make this argument without being able to pinpoint what a model of intelligence actually is. "Human brains lack any model of intelligence. It's just neurons firing in complicated patterns in response to inputs based on what statistically leads to reproductive success"
I don't think your detraction has much merit. If I don't understand how a combustion engine works, I don't need that engineering knowledge to tell you that a bicycle [an LLM] isn't a car [a human brain] just because it fits the classification of a transportation vehicle [conversational interface]. This topic is incredibly fractured because there is too much monetary interest in redefining what "intelligence" means, s…
There is a second problem that we aren't looking for [human brain] or [brain], but [intelligence] or [sapient] or something similar. We aren't even sure what we want as many people have different ideas, and, as you pointed out, we have different people with different interest pushing for different underlying definitions of what these ideas even are.
There is also a great deal of impreciseness in most any definitions we use, and AI encroaches on this in a way that reality rarely attacks our definitions. Philosophically, we aren't well prepared to defend against such attacks. If we had every ancestor of the cat before us, could we point out the first cat from the last non-cat in that lineup? In a precise way that we would all agree upon that isn't arbitrary? I doubt we could.