It goes a tad bit beyond classical conditioning... LLM’a provides a much better semantic experience than any previous technology, and is great for relating input to meaningful content. Think of it as an improved search engine that gives you more relevant info / actions / tool-suggestions etc based on where and how you are using it.
Here’s a great article that gives some insight into the knowledge features embedded into a larger model: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/
To be honest, I’m not sure what we’re arguing - we both seem to have a sound understanding of what LLM is and what it is not.
I’m not trying to defend or market LLM, I’m just describing the usability of the current capabilities of typical LLMs.