I don’t have a deep understanding of how these language models work, but what do I know makes think that saying “It is basically a lookup table” is sort of like saying “A car is basically a bike”.

Sure, there are some very vague similarities, but they are also incredibly different.

A bike and a car both take you places. But the kinds of places they can take you and how effectively they do so differs vastly.

Likewise, both lookup tables and LLMs take an input and then spit something out. But the similarities basically stop there.