> Intelligence isn't about memorising information—it's about finding elegant patterns that explain complex phenomena. Scale provides the computational space needed for this search, not storage for complicated solutions.
I think the word finding is overloaded, here. Are we "discovering," "deriving," "deducing," or simple "looking up" these patterns?
If "finding" can be implemented via a multi-page tour—ie deterministic choose-your-own-adventure—of a three-ring-binder (which is, essentially, how inference operates) then we're back at Searle's Chinese Room, and no intelligence is operative at runtime.
On the other hand, if the satisfaction of "finding" necessitates the creative synthesis of novel records pertaining to—if not outright modeling—external phenomena, ie "finding" a proof, then arguably it's not happening at training time, either.
How many novel proofs have LLMs found?
Even simpler: intelligence is the art of simplifying. LLMs can fool us if they reduce a book into one wise-looking statement, but remove the deceptive medium - our language - and tell it to reduce a vast dataset of points into one formula, and LLMs will show how much intelligence they truly have.