Yeah, for a tech person like me it is even obvious. Take ChatGPT for example. All it is doing is tossing a many-sided dice to choose a next word to finish a text. Yes, the user prompt is considered as a text that should be extended by the neural network.

I am not downplaying the role of OpenAI engineers. They did a really amazing job to make a language model that assigns probabilities for words in a given context. But in the end, it is just a random number generator that chooses one word at a time from a given list.

Eh, you can't make a truly modular product with long life in a quick innovation industry.

Take electronics for example. Your modules need some standardised bus protocol to communicate with each other. This is the base of any modular product. The problem is that those protocols are developing also. So any fixed modular architecture will drag your product behind non-modular competitors. Take storage for example. Phones evolved from parallel NAND flash to embedded MMC to UFS. Imagine that your modular product will always be limited to speeds and storage capability that were available 20 years ago.

Please stop calling it "AI". It is artificial, no doubt, but there is no intelligence. It can't even do basic logic inference.

Only 20 missiles this time.

If you are American, then it is (partially) yours anyway. Because you paid taxes to make it happen.

This is the reason why NASA freely publishes data from all science missions.