We are aware of the term of art.
The point that was trying to be made, which I agree with, is that anthropomorphizing a statistical model isn’t actually helpful. It only serves to confuse laypersons into assuming these models are capable of a lot more than they really are.
That’s perfect if you’re a salesperson trying to dump your bad AI startup onto the public with an IPO, but unhelpful for pretty much any other reason, especially true understanding of what’s going on.
If that was their point, it would have been more constructive to actually make it.
To your point, it's only anthropomorphization if you make the anthrocentric assumption that "thinking" refers to something that only humans can do.[1]
And I don't think it confuses laypeople, when literally telling it to "think" achieves the very similar results as in humans - it produces output that someone provided it out-of-context would easily identify as "thinking out loud", and improves the accuracy of results like how... thinking does.
The best mental model of RLHF'd LLMs that I've seen is that they are statistical models "simulating"[1] how a human-like character would respond to a given natural-language input. To calculate the statistically "most likely" answer that an intelligent creature would give to a non-trivial question, with any sort of accuracy, you need emergent effects which look an awful like like a (low fidelity) simulation of intelligence. This includes simulating "thought". (And the distinction between "simulating thinking" and "thinking" is a distinction without a difference given enough accuracy)
I'm curious as to what "capabilities" you think the layperson is misled about, because if anything they tend to exceed layperson understanding IME. And I'm curious what mental model you have of LLMs that provides more "true understanding" of how a statistical model can generate answers that appear nowhere in its training.
[1] It also begs the question of whether there exists a clear and narrow definition of what "thinking" is that everyone can agree on. I suspect if you ask five philosophers you'll get six different answers, as the saying goes.
> It also begs the question of whether there exists a clear and narrow definition of what "thinking" is that everyone can agree on. I suspect if you ask five philosophers you'll get six different answers, as the saying goes.
And yet we added a hand wavy 7th to humanize a peice of technology.