> Without it, there is no AI.

With a LLM alone, all you have is a stateless chatbot. If you increase the parameters of the LLM by a few orders of magnitude, you still have a stateless chatbot.

If you start with an anaemic LLM and run it with a ReAct loop and tool-calling, you now have something you can use to do agentic coding and RAG-like capabilities.

There's a reason why relatively small open weights models are starting to perform on par and even outperform models that need a huge datacenter to run.