Chollet's argument is that LLMs just imitate and recombine patterns. This might be true if you're looking at LLMs in isolation, but when they chat with people something different happens. The system made of humans+LLMs is an AGI. It is no longer just a parrot, it ingests new information, gets guidance, feedback and is basically embodied in a chat room with human and tools.
This scales for 200M users and 1 billion sessions per moth for OpenAI, which can interpret every human response as a feedback signal, implicit or explicit. Even more if you take multiple sessions of chat spreading over days, that continue the same topic and incorporate real world feedback. The scale of interaction is just staggering, the LLM can incorporate this experience to iteratively improve.
If you take a look at humans, we're very incapable alone. Think feral Einstein on a remote island - what could he achieve without the social context and language based learning? Just as a human brain is severely limited without society, LLMs also need society, diversity of agents and experiences, and sharing of those experiences in language.
It is unfair to compare a human immersed in society with a standalone model. That is why they appear limited. But even as a system of memorization+recombination they can be a powerful element of the AGI. I think AGI will be social and distributed, won't be a singleton. Its evolution is based on learning from the world, no longer just a parrot of human text. The data engine would be: World People LLM, a full feedback cycle, all three components evolve in time. Intelligence evolves socially.
