Apologies if this comes off as rude, but as an engineer involved in reinforcement learning, it's upsetting when people make claims like this based on conjecture and hand-wavey understandings of ML. Some day there will be goal-driven agents that can interact with the world, and those agents will be harmed by those kinds of incorrect understandings of machine learning.

The key difference is that your thinking feeds into your word choice.

LLMs' thinking also feeds into their word choice. Where else would they be getting the words from, thin air? No, it's from billions of neurons doing what neurons do, thinking.

They can chatter and use words, but there is no support structure behind them.

What is a "support structure", in your mind? That's not a defined neuroscience, cog sci, or ML term, so it sounds to me like hand-waving.

The only “knowledge” they have access to is embedded into their training data.

LLMs can and do generalize beyond their training data, it's literally the whole point. Otherwise, they'd be useless.

Once that is done, they have no ability to “think” about it further.

During training, neural weights from previous examples are revisited and recontextualized given the new information. This is what leads to generalization.

It’s a practical example of a “Chinese Room” and many of the same philosophical arguments apply.

The Chinese Room is not a valid argument, because the same logic can be applied to other humans besides yourself.

Kinda the same thing though. You spent time finding the right auto-complete in your head. You weighed the words that fit the sentence you'd constructed in order to find the one most frequently encountered in conversations or documents that include specific related words. We're much more sophisticated at this process, but our whole linguistic paradigm isn't fundamentally very different from good auto-complete.

I’ve yet to see an LLM write, rewrite, then rewrite again it’s output.

It's because we (ML peeps) literally prevent them from deleting their own ouput. It'd be like if we stuck you in a room, and only let you interact with the outside world using a keyboard that has no backspace.

Seriously, try it. Try writing your reply without using the delete button, or backspace, or the arrow keys, or the mouse. See how much better you do than an LLM.

It's hard! To say that an LLM is not capable of thought just because it makes mistakes sometimes is to ignore the immense difficulty of the problem we're asking it to solve.